Entry · catalog no. 6211
dead presidents
/ /dɛd ˈprɛzɪdənts/ /DED PREZ-i-dents
noun · Harlem, New York · 1940s
✓ Verified
1.
Money; paper currency, for the late presidents printed on it.
“All I''m chasing is a little stack of dead presidents.”
Origin & Attribution
Harlem jive of the early 1940s. The columnist Dan Burley used dead Presidents for cash in his New York Amsterdam News column as early as March 1941 and again in his Original Handbook of Harlem Jive (1944). Hip-hop revived it decades later — Eric B. and Rakim, then the Hughes Brothers'' 1995 film — but the phrase was Black slang half a century before the movie, not from it.
1941
Dan Burley prints dead Presidents for cash in his Amsterdam News column
1944
Listed in Burley''s Original Handbook of Harlem Jive
1995
The Hughes Brothers'' film Dead Presidents revives it
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
Harlem, New York · 1940s
Spoken by
Harlem, New York
$DEADPRThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady85 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
60/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1941
in the culture
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
■
Dan Burley, Back Door Stuff, New York Amsterdam News — column · 1941
print
■
+ Cite a sourceDan Burley''s Original Handbook of Harlem Jive — book · 1944
book
See also