Entry · catalog no. 4324
freeby
/ /ˈfriːbi/ /FREE-bee
noun · Harlem · 1920s
✓ Verified
1.
Something given without charge. This is the spelling Rudolph Fisher used in 1928 and the one Calloway printed in the Hepster's Dictionary — freeby, no charge, gratis. The freebie spelling won out later; freeby is what the Harlem record actually says.
“Freeby, something for nothing, as complimentary tickets to a theater.”
Origin & Attribution
Black Harlem, 1920s — the same word as freebie, entered separately because the early Black sources spell it this way and the archive records what the sources say. Fisher's 1928 glossary has freeby. Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary has freeby. The Inter-State Tattler of 13 March 1925, the earliest evidence in English, splits it further: free-be's. Hughes and Bontemps print freebye in 1958. The doubled and drifting spellings are themselves the evidence that this was a spoken word being written down by people hearing it, not a word arriving from print.
1925
Inter-State Tattler prints it as free-be's
1928
Fisher's Harlem glossary: freeby
1944
Calloway prints freeby — no charge, gratis
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
Harlem · 1920s
Spoken by
Black Harlem, in the Black press and in speech
$FREEBYThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Faded101 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
25/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1925
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
@bxgriot
The Bronx, NY
@phillyanne
Philadelphia, PA
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
The Walls of Jericho, Rudolph Fisher, glossary p. 300 — book · 1928
book
■
Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary, 6th ed. — glossary · 1944
researched
■
+ Cite a sourceThe Book of Negro Folklore, eds. Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, p. 483 (as freebye) — book · 1958
book
Also spelled
See also