Entry · catalog no. 3705
hit a lick
/ /hɪt ə lɪk/ /HIT-uh-LIK
phrase · U.S. South (Houston, Texas hip-hop scene), later carried nationwide · 1990s
✓ Verified
1.
To pull off a fast score — most often a robbery, theft, drug sale, or hustle — that brings in a large sum of money quickly and with little sustained labor. The core sense is criminal: sticking up a person, a store, or a dealer for a payout. Over time the phrase stretched to cover any sudden windfall, legal or not — a lucky gambling win, a fat check, a lopsided trade — but even in its loosest use it keeps the flavor of getting paid fast rather than earned slow.
“He ain't worked all summer — dude just hit a lick and bought them Jordans off top.”
Origin & Attribution
Rooted in Black street and hustle culture, the phrase surfaces on record in Houston, Texas hip-hop in 1991, when Scarface rapped about hitting "a big lick" the same year Oakland's Digital Underground used the identical phrase on a national release. It is frequently and wrongly traced by casual slang sites to an unrelated 1891 phrase, "a hit and a lick," meaning to give something a half-hearted try — a coincidence of wording, not a shared lineage. Mainstream write-ups also tend to flatten it into generic "hip-hop slang" or "prison slang" without naming the specific Black Southern rap scene that
1991
Scarface and Digital Underground both release tracks using "hit a lick" within weeks of each other, the earliest documented recordings of the phrase.
1990s-2000s
Phrase spreads through gangsta and trap rap nationwide, becoming a standard term for a robbery or quick illicit payout.
2019
Roddy Ricch's "The Box" reintroduces the phrase to a mainstream pop audience.
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
U.S. South (Houston, Texas hip-hop scene), later carried nationwide · 1990s
Spoken by
Black American street and hip-hop communities; carried into prison vernacular and later into UK Black British slang (MLE
$HITALIThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady35 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
72/100
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
@nolakid
New Orleans, LA
@htxdri
Houston, TX
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
Scarface, "If it came through, we hit a big lick" (1991)
song, Mr. Scarface Is Back
■
Digital Underground, "Hit a lick, paid cash, said nothin, pimp shit" (1991)
song, Sons of the P
■
+ Cite a sourceWiktionary entry labeling the phrase African-American Vernacular, MLE, MTE
online dictionary
See also