Entry · catalog no. 0063
grease
/ /ɡriːz/ /GREEZ
verb · Black urban and jazz-circuit speech; later documented in prison and in the Northern Black cities · 1940s
✓ Verified
1.
To eat, plainly — no implication about how much.
“Let me grease right quick, then we can go.”
2.
To eat well and at length; to sit down to something serious.
“We greased at my auntie's till we couldn't move.”
3.
Of a particular dish, to work through it with appetite.
“He was greasing away on that chicken thigh.”
Origin & Attribution
This is jive-era Black vocabulary, out of the same Harlem-and-the-road speech Cab Calloway put into print. It rides on grease as a noun for food, the fat in the pan standing in for the meal, and Calloway's glossary lists the verb flatly, no gloss needed. What matters is that it kept moving after the jive era closed: into musicians' talk, into California prison yards, into Harlem youth fiction. Writers often present it as a Calloway coinage or a period curiosity. It was neither, and the printed record after 1944 is people using the word, not lexicographers listing it.
1944
Calloway's final Hepsters Dictionary prints grease as a verb, to eat
1946
Mezz Mezzrow uses it in running narration in Really the Blues
1982
Walter Dean Myers puts it in a Harlem-set novel, still current in Black youth speech
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Black urban and jazz-circuit speech; later documented in prison and in the Northern Black cities · 1940s
Spoken by
Black speakers of the jive and post-jive generations; carried on in prison speech and by older speakers
$GREASEThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Dormant82 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
55/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1944
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
■
Cab Calloway, The New Cab Calloway's Hepsters Dictionary: Language of Jive
1944
■
Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, Really the Blues
1946
■
Jazz for Moderns
1959
■
Edward Bunker, Animal Factory
1977
■
Walter Dean Myers, Won't Know Till I Get There
1982
■
+ Cite a sourceF.X. Toole, Rope Burns (spelled greeze)
2000
See also