Entry · catalog no. 1159
loosies
/ /ˈlusiz/ /LOO-seez
noun · New York City (Harlem, the South Bronx, Bed-Stuy, Staten Island), Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore; Black and immigrant neighborhoods nationally · 1980s
✓ Verified
1.
Cigarettes sold individually rather than by the pack, outside the tax and licensing system. The trade runs on the arithmetic of a thin week: a pack in New York can cost more than a day fare, and a single runs fifty cents to a dollar. Loosies move through bodegas, barbershops, corner stores, and men who hold a regular spot and are known there by name. The people selling are usually the same people the price is squeezing. The word is plural by habit; one of them is a loosie or, in older New York usage, a Lucy. Enforcement is uneven, occasionally violent, and has proven lethal.
“Run to the store and get me two loosies and a lighter.”
2.
In rap and the music press, a track put out on its own — no album, no mixtape, no rollout — usually straight to SoundCloud, YouTube or streaming. The metaphor is exact: the song is broken off from the pack and moved one at a time. The usage covers loose singles, freestyles and throwaways alike, and carries a slight edge of the informal about it: a loosie is not a campaign, it is something an artist had lying around and let go.
“He ain t dropped a project all year, just loosies.”
Origin & Attribution
The word is documented in Black and Latino working-class New York, and the everyday trade it names is dated by the people who lived it to the crack years of the 1980s, when corner stores in the South Bronx and elsewhere began breaking packs and selling singles for a quarter — a fact recorded in a 2018 public-health study whose older participants said so directly. Jonathon Green Dictionary of Slang gives the first print citation as Terry Williams 1992 ethnography Crackhouse, which glosses loosies in its vocabulary list; the variant Lucy appears in a 1995 rap-slang dictionary and again in Walter Dean Myers fiction in 2007. The correction owed here is a dating one. National readers were introduced to the word in July 2014, when Eric Garner was killed by NYPD officers on Staten Island during a stop for selling loosies, and much coverage since has treated it as new. It is at least two decades older in print and older still in speech. It is also not New York alone — Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore and the South all carry it — and the practice of selling singles is older than the word for it.
1992
Terry Williams glosses loosies in Crackhouse — the earliest print citation carried by Green Dictionary of Slang
2013
Researchers run thirteen focus groups with sixty-seven South Bronx smokers; older participants trace the neighborhood loosie trade to the 1980s crack years
2014
Eric Garner is killed by NYPD officers on Staten Island on July 17 during a stop for selling loosies; the word enters national news vocabulary
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
New York City (Harlem, the South Bronx, Bed-Stuy, Staten Island), Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore; Black and immigrant neighborhoods nationally · 1980s
Spoken by
Smokers and sellers in Black and Latino city neighborhoods; bodega and barbershop trade; and, in the second sense, rap fans and music writers
$LOOSIEThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady34 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
76/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1992
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
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
"loosies, n.," Green Dictionary of Slang, ed. Jonathon Green (citations 1992–2025)
dictionary · database
■
Terry Williams, Crackhouse: Notes from the End of the Line (Addison-Wesley, 1992)
book · printed
■
Klaus von Lampe, Marin Kurti and Jacqueline Johnson, "I m gonna get me a loosie: Understanding single cigarette purchases by adult smokers in a disadvantaged section of New York City," Preventive Medicine Reports 12, 2018
study · published
■
Kelly Phillips Erb, "NY Man Who Died During Arrest Attempt Allegedly Targeted For Selling Untaxed Cigarettes," Forbes, 8 August 2014
news · reported
■
+ Cite a sourceAdrian Nicole LeBlanc, Random Family (2003)
book · printed
See also