Entry · catalog no. 0032
naps
/ ˈnæps /NAPS
n. · national; Southern in origin · 1900s
✓ Verified
1.
Tightly coiled Black hair, especially at the roots and edges. Taken from nap, the raised fiber surface of woven cloth, and used both ways: as the insult a colorstruck century made of it, and — increasingly since the natural hair movement — as the plain name for what grows out of the head.
“Two weeks out from a wash and my naps had come all the way back.”
Origin & Attribution
Black American vernacular, attested from the turn of the twentieth century, from the textile sense of nap. The adjective nappy is older; the noun is documented in Paul Laurence Dunbar's 1902 novel — published in London as The Jest of Fate and in America as The Sport of the Gods — and in Thomas W. Talley's Negro Folk Rhymes in 1922. The word was reclaimed deliberately at the end of the century, most publicly by bell hooks in Happy to Be Nappy in 1999.
1902
Paul Laurence Dunbar's novel, published in London as The Jest of Fate, carries the earliest cited use
1957
R. S. Gold's "Vernacular of the Jazz World" in American Speech records it plainly: kinky hair
1999
bell hooks's Happy to Be Nappy turns the word toward children as praise
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
national; Southern in origin · 1900s
Spoken by
Black Americans nationally; Southern in origin, carried everywhere by migration
$NAPSThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Rising124 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
60/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1902
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.
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Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
The Jest of Fate — Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jarrold and Sons, London, 1902; published in the United States as The Sport of the Gods, Dodd, Mead, 1902
text · novel
■
Negro Folk Rhymes: Wise and Otherwise — Thomas W. Talley, Macmillan, 1922
text · folklore
■
"The Vernacular of the Jazz World" — Robert S. Gold, American Speech vol. 32 no. 4, 1957
text · scholarly article
■
+ Cite a sourceHappy to Be Nappy — bell hooks, illustrated by Chris Raschka, Hyperion, 1999
text · book
See also