Entry · catalog no. 1053
high yellow
/ /
adjective · Nationwide — Southern and Harlem usage ·
✓ Verified
1.
Of a Black person with very light skin. A colorism term, descriptive on its face and loaded underneath — it can be praise, accusation, or both in the same sentence.
“They put the high yellow girls up front in the chorus line and everybody noticed.”
Origin & Attribution
Rooted in the color hierarchies enforced during and after slavery and carried openly in Black speech through the Harlem Renaissance, when Zora Neale Hurston and her contemporaries wrote it into the record. The paper bag test and its cousins made the term a matter of who got in the door.
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide / diaspora
Nationwide — Southern and Harlem usage ·
Spoken by
$HIGHYEThe 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
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
Zora Neale Hurston, "Story in Harlem Slang" and 1942 glossary — glossary · 1942
submitted
■
Wallace Thurman, The Blacker the Berry — novel · 1929
submitted
■
+ Cite a sourceAudrey Elisa Kerr, The Paper Bag Principle — scholarship · 2006
submitted
See also