Entry · catalog no. 5009
foxy
/ /ˈfɑk.si/ /FOK-see
adjective · Black urban speech; Harlem's press and the R&B circuit carried it · 1940s
✓ Verified
1.
Of a woman: strikingly attractive, sharp-dressed, magnetic; fine.
“She stepped off the bus looking foxy enough to stop traffic on both sides of the street.”
2.
Of a thing: splendid, sharp, first-class.
“That's a foxy ride you pulled up in.”
Origin & Attribution
As Black praise for a fine-looking woman, foxy is documented in the Harlem press by 1943, when Dan Burley wrote of 'foxy chicks all togged to the bricks' in the New York Amsterdam Star-News, and he glossed the word again in his Original Handbook of Harlem Jive in 1944. Jump-blues shouter Eddie 'Cleanhead' Vinson set it to record in 1957 — 'bring your big fine foxy self on home' — and by 1962 the back-formed noun fox, as in 'she's a real fox,' appears in Paul Crump's prison novel Burn, Killer, Burn!. An older, whiter strand of foxy meaning 'stylish' floats back to 1890s student slang, but the specific fine-woman sense that America knows was cured in Black speech of the 1940s and 50s. Jimi Hendrix — himself a product of that speech community and the chitlin circuit — sent 'Foxy Lady' around the world in 1967, and the 1970s made the word a costume; the source was two decades of Black talk before the first note.
1943
Dan Burley's 'foxy chicks' in the N.Y. Amsterdam Star-News
1957
Eddie 'Cleanhead' Vinson sings 'big fine foxy self' on record
1967
Hendrix's 'Foxy Lady' carries the word worldwide
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Black urban speech; Harlem's press and the R&B circuit carried it · 1940s
Spoken by
Harlem writers, jump-blues and R&B performers, and Black speakers coast to coast
$FOXYThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Faded83 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
80/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1943
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
■
N.Y. Amsterdam Star-News (Dan Burley column) — 1943
archive · verified
■
Cleanhead's Back in Town — Eddie 'Cleanhead' Vinson — 1957
song · verified
■
+ Cite a sourcefoxy, adj. / fox, n. — Green's Dictionary of Slang
scholarship · verified
See also