Entry · catalog no. 1221
eight-rock
/ /ˈeɪt ˌrɑk/ /AYT-rok
noun · Mississippi and the Deep South, then Harlem and Northern cities · 1910s
✓ Verified
1.
A person of very dark complexion. Spoken inside Black communities about Black people — most often to wound, occasionally as flat description.
“Somebody down the bar called him a eight-rock and the whole room got quiet.”
2.
The black ball in pool, the object the insult borrows from.
“He had the six lined up clean until the eight-rock drifted across the pocket.”
Origin & Attribution
Black Southern speech, out of the pool hall — the metaphor is the black eight ball in American pool, a game codified around 1900. The earliest record found is Mississippi, 1911, in a Jackson police-court case where the insult passes from one Black man to another and the defendant explains the term to the judge. It travelled north with the Great Migration and was still live enough in Harlem for Hurston to list it in her 1942 glossary, in the same family as inky dink and coal-scuttle blonde. It is regularly presented as a Hurston coinage or a Harlem Renaissance word; it is neither, being thirty-one years older and Southern.
1911
Printed in a Jackson, Mississippi court report — one Black man to another
1926
Sung in "Blue Gummed Blues," published by Handy Brothers
1942
Listed by Zora Neale Hurston in the glossary to "Story in Harlem Slang"
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
Mississippi and the Deep South, then Harlem and Northern cities · 1910s
Spoken by
Black Americans, in-group; pool halls and street talk into general Black vernacular
$EIGHTRThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Historical115 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
30/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1911
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
@nolakid
New Orleans, LA
@htxdri
Houston, TX
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
Jackson Daily News (Mississippi) — court report — newspaper · 27 Nov 1911
Earliest known record; the defendant explains that the eight rock is the black ball
■
A. J. Pollock — The Underworld Speaks — glossary · 1935
Cited in Green's Dictionary of Slang
■
+ Cite a sourceZora Neale Hurston — Glossary of Harlem Slang — glossary · 1942
Listed among the colorism terms
See also