Entry · catalog no. 1167
Double Dutch
/ /ˈdʌbəl ˈdʌtʃ/ /DUB-uhl DUTCH
noun · Harlem, the Bronx, Brooklyn and the Lower East Side; Philadelphia; Chicago South Side; now international, with strong competitive scenes in Japan and France · 1970s
✓ Verified
1.
A rope game in which two turners swing a pair of ropes toward each other in eggbeater fashion while one or more jumpers enter, work, and exit without a catch. In Black neighborhoods it is played on sidewalks and in schoolyards, often with clothesline, and it carries far more than footwork: entry timing, rhyme, cadence, insult, praise, and a whole apprenticeship system in which older girls teach younger ones. The rhythm is the point. A jumper who can hear the ropes can do dance steps, splits and flips inside a window measured in fractions of a second.
“My grandmother could still turn double dutch at sixty — she was the only one on the block who never let the rope drop.”
2.
The organized competitive sport built from that game, judged on compulsory routines, speed jumping and freestyle. Governed since the 1970s by leagues founded in New York, contested at national and international championships, and dominated at various points by teams from Harlem, Brooklyn, Japan and France. Adopted as an officially sanctioned varsity sport by New York City public high schools beginning in spring 2009 — the first school district in the United States to do so.
“She is not just jumping rope, she is on the varsity double dutch team — they have got a meet at the Apollo in December.”
Origin & Attribution
The name is Dutch-colonial New York; the practice, as it exists and matters, is Black and Latina girls work in twentieth-century American cities — Harlem, the Bronx, Brooklyn, the Lower East Side, and their equivalents in Philadelphia, Chicago and Washington. This distinction is the correction that needs making. The standard line, repeated by wire services and league literature alike, is that Dutch settlers brought the game to New Amsterdam. That is a fact about a name, not about a form. What double dutch is — the polyrhythm, the rhyme repertoire, the call-and-response, the tricks, the tradition of learning from an older sister on a stoop — was made by Black girls, and ethnomusicologist Kyra D. Gaunt has argued at length that these games carry the working DNA of Black popular music. A second correction: David A. Walker and Ulysses Williams, two NYPD community affairs detectives, are rightly credited with turning it into a sport in 1973, but they formalized something they found already alive in Harlem; they did not invent it. A third: double dutch was inside hip-hop from the start — the Fantastic Four performed at the Roxy in 1982 and traveled on the New York City Rap Tour that introduced hip-hop to Europe — and was written out of the genre origin story by the men who told it.
1973
NYPD detectives David A. Walker and Ulysses Williams begin developing the Harlem street game into a scored team sport; the first tournament is held February 14, 1974, with nearly 600 students
1980
The Fantastic Four win the world championship, appear in McDonald commercials and are featured in the documentary Pick Up Your Feet; Frankie Smith records Double Dutch Bus in Philadelphia
2009
Double dutch becomes an officially sanctioned varsity sport in New York City public high schools, the first district in the country
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Harlem, the Bronx, Brooklyn and the Lower East Side; Philadelphia; Chicago South Side; now international, with strong competitive scenes in Japan and France · 1970s
Spoken by
Black girls and women above all — jumpers, turners, coaches and officials across generations; also Black and Latino boys, PE teachers, and an international competitive circuit
$DOUBLEThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Enduring53 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
68/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1973
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
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
David A. Walker, "The History of Double Dutch," National Double Dutch League
history · organizational
■
Kyra D. Gaunt, The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop (NYU Press, 2006)
book · printed
■
"NYC adds double dutch as school sport," Associated Press, 2008
news · reported
■
Allyson McCabe, "How the Fantastic Four took Double Dutch to new heights," NPR All Things Considered, 6 December 2022
radio · broadcast
■
+ Cite a sourcePick Up Your Feet: The Double Dutch Show (1981)
documentary
See also