Entry · catalog no. 4715

cop

/ /kɑp/ /kop

verb · Harlem's jazz world outward into Black speech everywhere · 1930s

✓ Verified

To get, obtain, or acquire — whether by buying, taking, catching, or winning.

“I'm about to cop a new pair of J's this weekend.”

Origin & Attribution

A correction is owed here: cop meaning to obtain is not Black in origin. It is British underworld cant, printed in Swell's Night Guide around 1846, from a dialect verb meaning to grab, back through Anglo-Norman to Latin capere. What is Black is everything that happened to it afterward. Cab Calloway put it in the Hepster's Dictionary in 1939 as plain Harlem vocabulary — cop, to get, to obtain — and from there Black speech built the whole phrasal family: cop a nod, cop a plea, cop a squat, cop an attitude. It eventually generalized back into the flat, useful sense of getting anything at all, which is how a sneaker site can now write cop or drop without knowing whose mouth that came out of. The archive records this one as carried and extended, not coined.

1846

Earliest English attestation of the obtain sense, in British underworld cant — not Black in origin

1939

Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary defines cop as to get, to obtain, in plain Harlem vocabulary

2000s

Cop becomes standard in hip-hop and sneaker culture for any purchase

Region of origin

West

Midwest

N.East

South

The Northeast

Harlem's jazz world outward into Black speech everywhere · 1930s

Spoken by

Jazz musicians and hustlers, then hip-hop, then sneaker and streetwear culture

$COPThe Record · cultural traction

▲ Steady

87 yrs

ahead of the mainstream

82/100

peak cultural energy

Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.

Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest

First used

1939

in the culture

Recorded here

2026

point of first record

Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.

Hear it spoken

By region — how it actually sounds

@bxgriot

The Bronx, NY

@phillyanne

Philadelphia, PA

Contribute your pronunciation

Citations & Sources

■

Cab Calloway, Hepster's Dictionary, 1939

glossary

■

David Wilton, "cop," Wordorigins.org, 2020

etymological essay

■

Dictionary.com Slang Dictionary, "cop," 2018

dictionary entry

■

Green's Dictionary of Slang, "cop, v." — dates the obtain sense to 1846

historical slang dictionary

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