Entry · catalog no. 1308
gris-gris
/ /ˈɡɹiɡɹi/ /GREE-gree
noun, verb · Black New Orleans and Louisiana; from Mande-speaking West Africa by way of the Atlantic slave trade · 1880s
✓ Verified
1.
A charm or talisman: a small cloth or leather pouch holding a ritually specified set of objects, worn on the body or hidden in a house, for protection, luck, or harm.
“She sewed a gris-gris into the lining and told him not to open it for any reason.”
2.
To fix or bewitch somebody; the act of putting a charm on a person.
“Somebody put gris-gris on that man and his luck has not turned since.”
Origin & Attribution
West African, specifically from the Muslim Mande-speaking communities of present-day Senegal, Mali, and the Volta basin, where scholars produced amulets inscribed with Qur'anic verses and the Dyula are credited with spreading the practice. It came to Louisiana through the Atlantic slave trade and became central to Louisiana Voodoo and hoodoo. The etymology most often given is wrong: gris-gris is not French gris, gray, and does not mean gray magic somewhere between white and black. The spelling is French-looking because Louisiana is; the word is Mande. What is distinctly New Orleanian is the second sense — the malefic, to-gris-gris-somebody use — which Louisiana developed and which Haitian usage, closer to the protective West African intent, did not. It is kin to the Kongo-influenced mojo bag but is not the same object. Readers should be wary of the tourist-trade literature descending from Robert Tallant's 1946 Voodoo in New Orleans, which sensationalized Black practice and remains the source of much of what circulates.
1849
New Orleans authorities arrest an enslaved man carrying a human finger wrapped in flannel as a luck object
1889
The Journal of American Folklore records the Louisiana double sense — the charm and the act of bewitching
1968
Dr. John's debut album Gris-Gris is released on Atco on January 22, putting the word into international pop vocabulary
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Black New Orleans and Louisiana; from Mande-speaking West Africa by way of the Atlantic slave trade · 1880s
Spoken by
Black New Orleans — practitioners, clients, and the neighborhoods that knew who to go to
$GRISGRThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady137 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
61/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1889
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
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Citations & Sources
■
Yvonne P. Chireau — Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition — book, Univ. of California Press · 2003
pp. 35, 47–49; the strongest scholarly anchor for gris-gris in African American conjuring
■
Dr. John — Gris-Gris — LP, Atco Records · 22 Jan 1968
Produced by Harold Battiste, recorded 1967 in Los Angeles; the record that carried the word out of Louisiana
■
Robert E. Handloff — "Prayers, Amulets, and Charms: Health and Social Control," African Studies Review 25:2/3 — journal · 1982
pp. 186–188; the Mande and Dyula transmission of the amulet tradition
■
+ Cite a sourceW. W. Newell — "Reports of Voodoo Worship in Hayti and Louisiana," Journal of American Folk-Lore 2:4 — journal · 1889
p. 44; cited for the nineteenth-century Louisiana double sense
See also