Entry · catalog no. 4403
dims and brights
/ /dɪmz ən ˈbraɪts/ /DIMZ and BRYTES
noun phrase (plural) · Harlem and the Black touring-musician circuit · 1940s
✓ Verified
1.
Nights and days taken together: the passage of time. Built from two separate jive nouns — a 'dim' is the evening or night, a 'bright' is the day or the daylight — paired the way standard English pairs 'day and night.' Used to measure a stretch of living, not a clock reading.
“I been off that gig a while now — plenty dims and brights since anybody paid me.”
Origin & Attribution
The parts are firmly Harlem and firmly documented: Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary lists 'Dim (n.): evening' and 'Bright (n.): day' from its first 1938 edition, along with 'brightnin'' for daybreak, 'early bright' for morning and 'set of seven brights' for a week. Black newspapers were using the vocabulary in print by the late 1930s — the Pittsburgh Courier ran 'from bright to black' and 'brights and blacks' in 1939 and 1940 — so this was a live counting system in Black speech, not a novelty. The paired phrase 'dims and brights' is genuine, but the anchor commonly given for it is wrong. It is not verifiable in Dan Burley's Original Handbook of Harlem Jive (1944); Green's Dictionary of Slang, which does cite Burley elsewhere for 'set of seven brights,' dates the pair to Robert S. Gold's 'The Vernacular of the Jazz World' in American Speech XXXII:4 (1957), page 277, glossed exactly as 'Nights and days.' The honest reading is that the compound was spoken in the 1930s and 1940s and reached print in 1957, in a scholarly survey of a vocabulary already two decades old.
1938
Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary prints 'Dim (n.): evening' and 'Bright (n.): day' — the components in place.
1944
'Set of seven brights' (one week) appears in both Calloway's new edition and Burley's Original Handbook of Harlem Jive.
1957
Robert S. Gold records the pair in American Speech: 'dims and brights. Nights and days.'
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Harlem and the Black touring-musician circuit · 1940s
Spoken by
Black musicians, hustlers and nightlife regulars who kept musicians' hours and counted time by them
$DIMSANThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Historical69 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
17/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1957
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.
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Citations & Sources
■
Cab Calloway, "Hepster's Dictionary: A Guide to the Language of Jive" — pamphlet · 1938
published
■
Robert S. Gold, "The Vernacular of the Jazz World," American Speech XXXII:4, p. 277 — journal article · 1957
published
■
+ Cite a sourceJonathon Green, "bright, n.," Green's Dictionary of Slang — dictionary · 2026 digital edition
researched
See also