Entry · catalog no. 0013
jux
/ dʒʌks /JUCKS
verb · New York City · 1990s
✓ Verified
1.
To rob a person face to face, on the street — a mugging or a stickup, as opposed to a burglary, a con or a swindle. The word carries the physical immediacy of it.
“Don't be walking through there with that chain out, they'll jux you.”
2.
The robbery itself.
“He caught a jux coming off the train.”
Origin & Attribution
New York City Black street speech, shaped by the everyday contact between African American and Caribbean communities in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx from the 1980s onward. The etymology commonly given runs it back to Jamaican Creole jook or jooks, to poke or stab and by extension to rob, itself often traced further to Fula jukka; that chain is asserted rather than argued from dated evidence. Green's Dictionary of Slang labels it US Black. It has nothing to do with jukebox, juke joint, or the football sense of juke.
2003
50 Cent's "What Up Gangsta" puts the word on a multi-platinum record
2008
Richard Price uses it as documentary Lower East Side speech in Lush Life
2010s
Entered in Green's Dictionary of Slang, labeled US black
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
New York City · 1990s
Spoken by
Black and Caribbean New Yorkers; carried nationally by New York rap
$JUXThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady23 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
48/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
2003
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
■
"What Up Gangsta" — 50 Cent, Get Rich or Die Tryin', Shady/Aftermath/Interscope, 2003
audio · song
■
Lush Life — Richard Price, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008
text · novel
■
+ Cite a sourceGreen's Dictionary of Slang, jux v. — Jonathon Green
text · cited
See also