Entry · catalog no. 1302
jeff
/ /dʒɛf/ /JEF
noun, verb · Black American; Harlem and Chicago jive of the 1940s, later general Black speech and Black prison vernacular · 1940s
✓ Verified
1.
To act servile toward white people: to grin, defer, and make yourself small for white approval.
“He was jeffing so hard for that foreman I had to look at the floor.”
2.
A Black person who does that; functionally a synonym for Uncle Tom.
“They put a jeff in charge of the whole floor and called it progress.”
3.
A white person, especially a hostile one or a Southern rube.
“Chalk the walking jeffs — two of them coming up the block.”
4.
To lie, to run a line, to bullshit somebody. The prison and street sense, still current.
“Quit jeffing me, you were never anywhere near that room.”
Origin & Attribution
Black American, from a clipping of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy. That etymology is what makes the word's split personality coherent: Jeff Davis stands for the white Southern racist, and the same name transfers to the Black man who bows to him. Mezzrow and Wolfe recorded the full form and the shortening in 1946. The strongest evidence that the servile sense is in-group vocabulary comes from dialect fieldwork: a 1969 Publication of the American Dialect Society survey lists jeff, jeffer, jeff davis, and jeff artist as names for a Black man subservient to whites, used exclusively by Black speakers. One correction is worth making plainly, because it circulates widely: jeff is not in Cab Calloway's 1938 Hepster's Dictionary. It appears in the 1944 revised edition, and there with an unrelated gloss — a pest, a bore. Anyone citing Calloway 1938 for this word is citing a book that does not contain it.
1944
First dated print attestation, in two independent Harlem jive glossaries — Calloway's revised edition and Dan Burley's handbook
1946
Mezzrow and Wolfe record the Jeff Davis source and the shortening
1969
American Dialect Society fieldwork documents jeff and its variants as Black-only vocabulary for a subservient Black man
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide / diaspora
Black American; Harlem and Chicago jive of the 1940s, later general Black speech and Black prison vernacular · 1940s
Spoken by
Black Harlem and Chicago in the 1940s; later Black prisoners, and Black workers describing the man who performs for the boss
$JEFFThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Fading82 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
34/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1944
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
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
Publication of the American Dialect Society, no. 51 — dialect survey · 1969
p. 29; lists jeff, jeffer, jeff davis, jeff artist for a Black man subservient toward whites, marked as used exclusively by Black speakers
■
Mezz Mezzrow & Bernard Wolfe — Really the Blues — book · 1946
p. 307 glossary; gives Jeff Davis as an unenlightened person or Southern hick, sometimes shortened to jeff — the contemporaneous record of the etymology
■
Dan Burley — Dan Burley's Original Handbook of Harlem Jive — book · 1944
Burley wrote for the New York Amsterdam News and the Chicago Defender; the best Black-authored 1940s source for the word
■
+ Cite a sourceChester Himes — The Real Cool Killers — novel · 1958
p. 107; jeffs for white police, in a Black novelist's Harlem
See also