Entry · catalog no. 1062
in the groove
/ /ɪn ðə ˈɡruːv/ /in-thuh-GROOV
phrase · northeast · 1930s
✓ Verified
1.
Locked in and moving right — nothing forced, nothing off. Calloway's gloss: perfect, no deviation, down the alley.
“Once the rhythm section settled, the whole band was in the groove.”
Origin & Attribution
Black swing musicians, 1930s. The groove was first a literal thing — the record groove the needle rode — and became the name for the feel a band finds when it stops fighting the time. The word survives in mainstream English as groovy, a 1960s softening that hid where it came from.
1938
Calloway defines it in the Hepster's Dictionary
1960s
Softened into 'groovy'
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
northeast · 1930s
Spoken by
Black swing musicians; now general English
$INTHEGThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady88 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
First used
1938
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
@bxgriot
The Bronx, NY
@phillyanne
Philadelphia, PA
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
+ Cite a sourceCab Calloway — Hepster's Dictionary: A Guide to the Language of Jive — book · 1938
submitted
See also