Entry · catalog no. 1265
jukebox
/ /ˈdʒuːkbɑːks/ /JOOK-boks
n. · Gullah/Geechee coast; the South · 1930s
✓ Verified
1.
A coin-operated phonograph. The name is built on jook — a Black roadhouse, dance hall, drinking and gambling spot, usually rural and working-class. The machine is named for the room, not the other way around.
“Wasn't a band that night, just the jukebox and whoever had a nickel.”
Origin & Attribution
Gullah and Geechee speech of the coastal Carolinas, Georgia and northern Florida, carried outward through Black Southern vernacular in the 1930s. Jook or joog means disorderly, wicked; the usual proposal traces it to Wolof dzug, to live wickedly, and the archive records that as probable rather than proven. The jook house reaches Black print early: the Kansas City Call described one on July 25, 1930, glossing it for readers as a dance hall and gambling dive. Zora Neale Hurston wrote in 1934 that musically speaking, the jook is the most important place in America, and used the word throughout Mules and Men the following year. The machine takes the name by 1939, when a white Mississippi school paper printed jook-box as something already familiar — the point at which the word had finished crossing over.
1930
Jook house in the Kansas City Call, a Black newspaper
1934
Hurston names the jook the most important musical place in America
1939
Jook-box in print; the word has crossed over
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
Gullah/Geechee coast; the South · 1930s
Spoken by
Gullah and Geechee speakers; Black Southerners
$JUKEBOThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady0 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
68/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1939
in the culture
Mainstream crossover
1939
search interest spikes
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
@nolakid
New Orleans, LA
@htxdri
Houston, TX
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
Kansas City Call, July 25, 1930
1930
■
Zora Neale Hurston, "Characteristics of Negro Expression"
1934
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+ Cite a sourceSunflower Petals (Moorhead, Mississippi), April 15, 1939
1939
See also