Question 1

What does “homeboy” mean?

Accepted Answer

Somebody from back home — your town, your place, your people. A close friend by extension. Black, Southern, and on paper since 1899.

Question 2

Where does “homeboy” come from?

Accepted Answer

Black, Southern, and nineteenth century. The two earliest citations are both from the Colored American, a Black newspaper in Washington — 15 November 1899 and 12 November 1904. The word travels north and west with the Great Migration, into cities where the first question is where you are from, and it names the person from back home. Two misattributions to strike. The first is Los Angeles: LA is where the word was re-centered and where it fused with gang affiliation, documented in Edith Folb 1980 study of South Central Black teenagers and in King Tee 1987 line about Compton being the city where the homeboys stay — but that is eighty years after the fact. The second, and the more common, is a Chicano or barrio origin. Chicano homeboy is a later adoption in LA; the earliest Latino-context citation in the lexicographic record is 1993, thirteen years after Folb recorded it among Black teenagers in the same city and ninety-four years after the Colored American. Etymonline dating of the 1940s is also too late by about forty years.