Entry · catalog no. 0004
jitney
/ ˈdʒɪtni /JIT-nee
noun · Pittsburgh (Hill District), Pennsylvania · 1940s
✓ Verified
1.
An unlicensed cab working out of a neighborhood stand, run by and for Black residents in cities where the licensed companies would not send cars. Illegal by city ordinance and indispensable in practice. In Pittsburgh's Hill District the jitney stand was also a standing institution — a place men worked, waited, argued and raised each other.
“Cab wouldn't come up the Hill, so I called a jitney.”
2.
Earlier and more general: a nickel, and by extension any vehicle carrying passengers for a nickel fare.
“Ride cost you a jitney and not a penny more.”
Origin & Attribution
The word begins as Black American slang for a nickel — in print by 1903 as St. Louis slang, most likely from jetnée, a Louisiana Creole and Black Southern form of French jeton, a token. It transferred to the five-cent passenger car around 1914 and then narrowed, in Black Northern neighborhoods, to the community cab service. Pittsburgh's Hill District is where that sense is best documented and where August Wilson found it. Two corrections: Wilson did not coin it, and the word is not simply French, as most etymologies imply — the Black American transmission is the whole story.
1903
First print appearance as slang for a coin, Cincinnati Enquirer on St. Louis slang
1946
Silas Knox, a former jitney driver, founds Owl Cab in Pittsburgh after Yellow Cab refuses the Hill
1982
August Wilson's Jitney premieres at Allegheny Repertory Theatre, Pittsburgh
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
Pittsburgh (Hill District), Pennsylvania · 1940s
Spoken by
Black drivers and riders in Pittsburgh, Detroit and Chicago
$JITNEYThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady123 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
65/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1903
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.
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By region — how it actually sounds
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The Bronx, NY
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Philadelphia, PA
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Citations & Sources
■
Jitney — August Wilson, written 1979, first produced 1982
stage · play
■
"In an Era of Segregation, Owl Cab Mobilized Black Pittsburgh" — Charlene Foggie-Barnett, Carnegie Museum of Art, 2015
text · archive essay
■
+ Cite a sourceCharles "Teenie" Harris Archive, Owl Cab and Hill District jitney photographs, c. 1940-1950, Carnegie Museum of Art
photograph · archive
See also