Entry · catalog no. 1893

crib

/ /krɪb/ /KRIB

noun · U.S. urban Black communities, especially New York and the wider Northeast corrid · 1980s

✓ Verified

One's home — a house, apartment, or room where a person lives and feels most themselves. It carries warmth and ownership beyond the plain word "house": your crib is where you rest, host, and are fully yourself, and inviting someone there is a mark of trust.

“Come through to the crib after the show, we got food.”

Origin & Attribution

The word's small-dwelling sense goes back centuries in English, but its modern meaning as a Black American term for "home" took shape in the postwar Black urban vernacular and was carried forward through jazz and R&B slang before becoming a hip-hop staple in the 1980s and 1990s. Mainstream coverage routinely credits MTV's 'Cribs' (launched 2000) or generic 'internet slang' for the word, but by the time the show borrowed the term it had already been standard Black vernacular for describing a home for decades.

1945-1950s

Word takes root in postwar Black urban vernacular as a term for one's home, building on the older English small-dwelling sense.

1980s-1990s

Term becomes a fixture of hip-hop lyrics and everyday Black speech nationwide, referring to one's house or apartment.

2000

MTV launches 'Cribs,' borrowing the term for a celebrity home-tour show, cementing it in mainstream pop culture.

Region of origin

West

Midwest

N.East

South

The Northeast

U.S. urban Black communities, especially New York and the wider Northeast corrid · 1980s

Spoken by

Black American speakers broadly, and especially hip-hop artists and listeners who carried the word into mainstream youth

$CRIBThe Record · cultural traction

▲ Enduring

81 yrs

ahead of the mainstream

78/100

peak cultural energy

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

Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest

First used

1945

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

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post-WWII chiefly US black — a dwelling house, an apartment

Green's Dictionary of Slang, entry "crib, n.¹"

■

Damn, bitch, get yo fly ass over to my crib!

Urban Dictionary, user entry, 2003

■

crib goes all the way back to the 1800s... it is still commonly used

Slang City word history, crib

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