Entry · catalog no. 1053

high yellow

/ /haɪ ˈjɛl.oʊ/ /hy YEL-oh

adjective · Nationwide — Southern and Harlem usage · 1920s

✓ Verified

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.

1920s

Written into the record in the Harlem Renaissance

2000s

Persists in colorism discourse

Region of origin

West

Midwest

N.East

South

The South

Nationwide — Southern and Harlem usage · 1920s

Spoken by

Southern and Harlem Black speakers

$HIGHYEThe Record · cultural traction

▲ Steady

106 yrs

ahead of the mainstream

52/100

peak cultural energy

Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.

Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest

First used

1920

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

@nolakid

New Orleans, LA

@htxdri

Houston, TX

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

■

Audrey Elisa Kerr, The Paper Bag Principle — scholarship · 2006

submitted

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