Entry · catalog no. 4202
main queen
/ /ˌmeɪn ˈkwiːn/ /mayn-KWEEN
noun · Harlem and the Pittsburgh–New York swing circuit · 1940s
✓ Verified
1.
The favorite girlfriend or the wife; the woman a man puts first. The term belongs to a whole family of swing-era words built on the same hierarchy — main momma, main stash, main on the hitch — and it is the direct ancestor of main squeeze.
“She is having a time with Edith, Johnny Hodge's main queen.”
Origin & Attribution
Black newspaper columnists and the swing-band circuit that ran between Harlem and Pittsburgh. The first print is the Pittsburgh Courier of 17 February 1940, naming the woman of Ellington's alto player Johnny Hodges; a Uniontown, Pennsylvania paper has it in 1942. Cab Calloway put it in his Hepster's Dictionary and was still using it thirty years later in his memoir Of Minnie the Moocher and Me. One correction the archive insists on: the dictionary text that circulates online as "Calloway 1938" is the 1944 sixth edition — its own foreword says so. Attribute the entry to 1944 unless a 1938 copy has been physically consulted. The phrase was also picked up by white gay slang from the mid-1960s for a much-desired man; that is a borrowing, not the source.
1940
First print: the Pittsburgh Courier, on Johnny Hodges' main queen
1944
Defined in Calloway's New Hepsters Dictionary
1976
Calloway uses it in his own memoir
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
Harlem and the Pittsburgh–New York swing circuit · 1940s
Spoken by
Black newspaper columnists and the swing-band and entertainment circuit
$MAINQUThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Faded86 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
18/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1940
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
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
Pittsburgh Courier — newspaper · 17 Feb 1940
researched
■
Morning Herald (Uniontown, PA) — newspaper · 8 June 1942
researched
■
The New Cab Calloway's Hepsters Dictionary: Language of Jive — 1944
reference
■
+ Cite a sourceOf Minnie the Moocher and Me, Cab Calloway and Bryant Rollins — memoir · 1976
book
See also