Entry · catalog no. 7403
licks
/ /lɪks/ /LIKS
noun · Harlem, New York City; jazz circuit · 1930s
✓ Verified
1.
Short, striking musical phrases — the hot runs and figures a soloist plays. Still the working musician's word for a memorable phrase, on any instrument, in any genre.
“He ran a couple licks before the band fell in behind him.”
Origin & Attribution
Black jazz musicians of the 1920s and 30s, where "hot licks" named the phrases that made a solo. Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary (1938) fixes it in print: "licks: hot musical phrases." The word passed into every genre that jazz touched — which is to say, every genre.
1920s
Hot licks in jazz-circuit speech
1938
Defined in Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary
1960s
Standard vocabulary across rock, country, and blues
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
Harlem, New York City; jazz circuit · 1930s
Spoken by
Jazz and blues musicians
$LICKSThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady88 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
1938
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
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Citations & Sources
■
Cab Calloway, Hepster's Dictionary: Language of Jive
1938
■
+ Cite a sourceThe New Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary
1944
See also