What does “my bad” mean?

An admission of fault, offered fast and without ceremony, so play can continue.

Entry · catalog no. 0005

my bad

/ maɪ bæd /MY BAD

interjection · U.S. Black communities; playground and pickup basketball · 1980s

✓ Verified

Said to claim responsibility for a mistake you just made — a dropped pass, a wrong turn, a misread instruction. It concedes the error and closes the matter in one breath, without apology as performance. The construction turns the adjective bad into a possessed noun, a nominalizing move characteristic of Black English.

“My bad — I thought you had the corner.”

Origin & Attribution

The phrase rose out of Black playground and pickup basketball culture, where a fast, unfussy admission of error keeps the run going. It is routinely credited to Sudanese-born NBA center Manute Bol, quoted using it in 1989 with the Golden State Warriors. That credit is misplaced: print citations predate Bol by four years, and his own biographer records him picking the phrase up from American teammates rather than inventing it. Bol popularized it inside the league. He did not coin it.

1985

Earliest known print use, in a Gainesville Sun sports column

1986

Entered the record twice: a pickup-basketball glossary and a UNC-Chapel Hill campus slang survey

1989

Manute Bol quoted using it; the coinage myth begins

Region of origin

West

Midwest

N.East

South

Nationwide / diaspora

U.S. Black communities; playground and pickup basketball · 1980s

Spoken by

Black ballplayers on public courts; carried outward by college and pro athletes

$MYBADThe Record · cultural traction

▲ Steady

41 yrs

ahead of the mainstream

95/100

peak cultural energy

Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.

Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest

First used

1985

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

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Citations & Sources

■

The Back-in-Your-Face Guide to Pick-up Basketball — Chuck Wielgus & Alexander Wolff, Dodd Mead, 1986

text · book

■

"UNC-CH Campus Slang" — University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, March 1986

text · slang survey

■

"The Manute Bol Theory of My Bad" — Ben Zimmer, Word Routes / Visual Thesaurus, 2010

text · lexicographic column

■

Manute: The Center of Two Worlds — Leigh Montville, 1993

text · biography

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