Entry · catalog no. 8699
hating
/ — /pending
verb · San Francisco Bay Area / West Coast, later nationwide · 1990s
✓ Verified
1.
To express resentment, envy, or unearned criticism toward someone else's success, style, or confidence — usually said of a person who talks down on someone doing well because that success threatens their own ego. It describes an attitude, not a factual complaint: the person 'hatin' is understood to be reacting out of jealousy rather than legitimate grievance, and calling someone out as 'hatin' is itself a way of dismissing their criticism as illegitimate.
“She just dropped a new business and all her cousin can do is talk down on it — that's just hatin'.”
Origin & Attribution
Rooted in Bay Area 'player/playa' culture of the late 1980s and early '90s, where a 'player hater' was someone who resented a player's game, money, or women. The verb form spread through West Coast rap before Notorious B.I.G. and Puff Daddy's 1997 'Playa Hater' interlude carried it into national hip-hop vocabulary, and Ice-T's 1999 'Don't Hate the Player' cemented the 'don't hate the player, hate the game' framing. Mainstream outlets often trace 'haters gonna hate' only to the 2012 meme era or to Taylor Swift's 2014 'Shake It Off,' erasing two full decades of prior Black usage — the phrase and
1991
Cypress Hill's 'Psycobetabuckdown' is cited as an early recorded use of 'hater'
1992
Pooh-Man's 'Player Haters' and later Mac Mall's 'Versatile' (1993) establish 'playa hatin' in Bay Area rap
1997
Notorious B.I.G.'s 'Playa Hater,' with Puff Daddy's spoken interlude, popularizes the term nationally
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The West
San Francisco Bay Area / West Coast, later nationwide · 1990s
Spoken by
Black American speakers broadly, especially in hip-hop and youth vernacular communities; later adopted across U.S. pop c
$HATINGThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Enduring35 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
78/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1991
in the culture
Recorded here
2026
point of first record
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
@bayarea
Oakland, CA
@ladi
Los Angeles, CA
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Citations & Sources
■
Pooh-Man, 'Player Haters,' 1992 — 'All that player hating did stop shit'
song/lyric
■
Mac Mall, 'Versatile,' 1993 — 'Stop playa hatin, because I'm comin versatile'
song/lyric
■
+ Cite a sourceNotorious B.I.G., 'Playa Hater,' 1997, with Puff Daddy interlude on playas vs. playa haters
song/interlude
Also spelled
See also