Entry · catalog no. 6014
kick
/ — /pending
noun · northeast · 2026
✓ Verified
1.
A thrill — the jolt of pleasure a thing gives you. Calloway listed it flatly: a kick, a thrill.
“He got a kick out of watching the young cats try to keep up.”
Origin & Attribution
Harlem jive, 1930s, documented in Calloway's 1938 dictionary. The word passed almost intact into general American English — get a kick out of it, doing it for kicks — and is now so ordinary that nobody hears it as anything. It came from the same rooms as the rest of the swing vocabulary.
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
northeast · 2026
Spoken by
northeast
$KICKThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Rising0 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
12/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
2026
in the culture
Recorded here
2026
point of first record
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