Entry · catalog no. 9205
kill me
/ /kɪl mi/ /KILL MEE
verb phrase · Harlem, New York City · 1930s
✓ Verified
1.
Swing-era jive for "knock me out": a command or plea to show the speaker a good time, to send them with music or style.
“Play that again, kill me!”
Origin & Attribution
Cab Calloway printed "Kill me" in his 1938 glossary, defined as showing a good time or sending the speaker. It belongs to the same swing-era Harlem vocabulary of extreme praise, in which being "killed" or "sent" meant being moved past words. Related terms from the same glossary, such as "killer-diller," are already in the archive.
1938
Calloway's glossary lists "kill me" as a plea to be shown a good time
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Harlem, New York City · 1930s
Spoken by
Black jazz musicians, dancers and audiences of the swing era
$KILLMEThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Historical88 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
6/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1938
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.
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Atlanta, GA
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Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
+ Cite a sourceCab Calloway, Cab Calloway's Cat-alogue: A Hepster's Dictionary (1938)
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See also