Entry · catalog no. 1010
gig
/ /
noun · Jazz circuit / nationwide ·
✓ Verified
1.
A job, especially a musician's booking; now any piece of paid work. The word behind "gig economy."
“He picked up a weekend gig playing keys at the lounge on MLK.”
Origin & Attribution
Black jazz musicians' working slang from the 1920s, in print by 1926 and glossed in the revised Hepster's Dictionary editions of the 1940s as a job of playing. Corporate America adopted it wholesale in the 2010s — the "gig economy" runs on a word Black horn players coined a century ago.
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide / diaspora
Jazz circuit / nationwide ·
Spoken by
$GIGThe Record · cultural traction
▲ 26 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
60/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
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
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Citations & Sources
■
Melody Maker — magazine · 1926
submitted
■
+ Cite a sourceThe New Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary — book · 1944
submitted
See also