Entry · catalog no. 1058
hep cat
/ /ˈhɛp kæt/ /HEP-kat
noun · northeast · 1930s
✓ Verified
1.
A man who is fluent in the culture — who knows the music, the talk, and the manner, and moves through all three without effort. Cab Calloway's own gloss: a guy who knows all the answers, understands jive.
“Every hep cat in Harlem was at the Savoy that night.”
Origin & Attribution
Harlem, 1930s. Built from hep (aware, in the know), which Black musicians carried into the swing era well before white America borrowed it. Cab Calloway printed it in his Hepster's Dictionary in 1938 — the first dictionary published by a Black American, and for years the New York Public Library's official reference on jive. Mainstream culture later recast the hepcat as a cartoon beatnik and forgot who was doing the knowing.
1938
Printed in Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary
1950s-60s
Recast as beatnik caricature
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
northeast · 1930s
Spoken by
Harlem swing musicians
$HEPCATThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Faded88 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
48/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1938
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
■
Cab Calloway — Hepster's Dictionary: A Guide to the Language of Jive — book · 1938
submitted
■
+ Cite a sourceThe New Cab Calloway's Cat-ologue: A Hepster's Dictionary, Revised Edition — book · 1939
submitted
See also