Entry · catalog no. 0053
inky dink
/ /ˈɪŋ.ki ˌdɪŋk/ /ING-kee DINK
noun · U.S. South and the urban Black North — Harlem, Chicago · 1940s
✓ Verified
1.
A Black person of very dark complexion. Used within Black communities, most often as a taunt or a diminishing nickname, occasionally turned around and used with affection between intimates.
“They called him inky dink all through grade school and he never once let them see it land.”
2.
In mid-century use, a person judged both very dark and unkempt — the color insult carrying a class insult along with it.
“Clarence Major recorded it as loosely applied, sometimes to a dark man who was also shabby.”
Origin & Attribution
This is an in-group word, and the people who wrote it down were Black writers documenting their own communities. Zora Neale Hurston listed it in the glossary she appended to Story in Harlem Slang in The American Mercury in July 1942, and Clarence Major entered it in his Dictionary of Afro-American Slang in 1970. It belongs to the same intraracial color grammar as high yellow, redbone and blue-black: a vocabulary Black people built to sort themselves under a regime that had already sorted them. Slang references sometimes float a British schoolboy-fiction derivation, from the nickname Inky in the Billy Bunter stories. That route is a guess, and it does not explain the word's actual home, which is Black American speech.
1942
Hurston publishes Story in Harlem Slang with its glossary in The American Mercury
1970
Clarence Major enters the word, noting an added charge of untidiness
1990s
Falls largely out of active use as the conversation shifts to colorism as a named concept
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide / diaspora
U.S. South and the urban Black North — Harlem, Chicago · 1940s
Spoken by
Black Americans, intraracially; children and adults, strongly associated with playground and family teasing
$INKYDIThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Faded84 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
35/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1942
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
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
Zora Neale Hurston, Story in Harlem Slang and glossary, The American Mercury
1942
■
Clarence Major, Dictionary of Afro-American Slang
1970
■
+ Cite a sourceZora Neale Hurston: Novels and Stories (Library of America), glossary reprinted
1995
See also