Question 1

What does “freebie” mean?

Accepted Answer

Something you get for nothing. The first recorded use of the word anywhere in English is in a Black Harlem newspaper in March 1925.

Question 2

Where does “freebie” come from?

Accepted Answer

Black Harlem, in print and in speech, by early 1925. The earliest evidence the Oxford English Dictionary has for this word in the whole of English is the Inter-State Tattler of 13 March 1925 — please explain how Bill Easton manages to get in on all the free-be's in town. The Tattler was a Black weekly published in Harlem; it had launched two weeks earlier. Everything close behind it is also Black: Rudolph Fisher's Harlem glossary in 1928 defines freeby as something for nothing, as complimentary tickets to a theater; the New York Age has it in 1937; Flash!, the Black picture magazine, the same year. Louis Armstrong uses it in his own prose in Satchmo in 1954. Hughes and Bontemps enter it in The Book of Negro Folklore in 1958. The formation itself is unexplained — the OED calls the -bie an arbitrary rhyming extension, which is what vernacular coinage looks like from the outside. One honest limit: a 1925 gossip column shows the word was already understood by its readers. It proves Black speakers are the first on record, not that they were the first to say it.