Entry · catalog no. 0248
lit
/ /lɪt/ /LIT
adjective · U.S. South and East Coast hip-hop scenes, spreading nationwide · 1990s
✓ Verified
1.
Charged with excitement, energy, or excellence — used of a party, song, performance, or moment that has reached a peak of collective hype. A secondary, older sense describes a person who is drunk or high, the feeling of being "turned up" past sober control. Both senses share a root idea: something (or someone) set ablaze, glowing, alive with an intensity that everyone in the room can feel.
“The whole block was outside by nine — DJ had the speakers going, and everybody was saying the party was lit.”
Origin & Attribution
The 'intoxicated' sense of lit is old, attested in print by 1918, but it was carried forward and kept alive through the twentieth century largely in Black vernacular speech rather than mainstream print. Black hip-hop artists took that dormant word and gave it new work in the late 1990s — Nas used it in 1996 to describe a scene charged with drama — pushing it toward the meaning of 'exciting' or 'excellent' well before the 2010s. A new generation of rap artists in the early 2010s (A$AP Rocky's 'Get Lit,' Travis Scott) pushed the excitement sense into everyday youth speech, at which point mainstr
1918
Earliest print citation of 'lit' meaning intoxicated, in a WWI aviator's diary.
1996
Nas raps 'the drama's lit' in "The Message," pushing the word toward 'exciting/charged' rather than just 'drunk.'
2011
A$AP Rocky's "Get Lit" helps carry the excitement sense into a new generation, followed by Travis Scott and others through the 2010s.
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide / diaspora
U.S. South and East Coast hip-hop scenes, spreading nationwide · 1990s
Spoken by
Black American youth and hip-hop culture broadly, later absorbed by Gen Z and Millennial speech nationwide
$LITThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady30 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
78/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1996
in the culture
Recorded here
2026
point of first record
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
1918 diary entry: "We all got lit and had a hell of a time"
text/memoir
■
1996, Nas, "The Message"
song
■
+ Cite a source2011, A$AP Rocky, "Get Lit"
song
See also