Entry · catalog no. 1327
nigga
/ /ˈnɪɡə/ /NIG-uh
noun · nationwide; African American English · 1900s
✓ Verified
1.
Among Black speakers: a man, a person, a fellow — roughly what guy or dude does in general American speech, with no insult carried. It takes any tone the sentence gives it, from warm to dismissive.
“My nigga been up since four driving that truck.”
2.
A close friend or kinsman, in the affectionate vocative.
“That's my nigga right there, since third grade.”
3.
A fool or a disappointment, when the tone turns.
“This nigga really showed up with no money.”
4.
Out of a white mouth, or any out-group mouth: not this word at all but the slur nigger, and heard that way regardless of spelling or intent.
“He said he was quoting the song. Nobody in the room heard a quotation.”
Origin & Attribution
A Black American reworking of the slur nigger, respelled to match how the word is actually pronounced in African American English, where the r at the end of a syllable is vocalized or dropped. Linguists including Geneva Smitherman and Arthur Spears treat nigga and nigger as two different words in Black discourse, separated by speaker, context and meaning rather than by spelling alone. The in-group use is documented well before hip-hop — it runs through Black fiction, blues and ordinary speech across the twentieth century — but rap from the late 1980s forward, N.W.A above all, carried the respelling into print and onto records at scale. The word has never been settled inside Black communities: plenty of Black speakers, and a long line of Black elders and writers, refuse it entirely.
1988
N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton puts the respelling on a mass-market record
1994
Geneva Smitherman's Black Talk documents the in-group senses and their range
1998
Arthur Spears publishes on the word's grammar and neutralized uses in African American English
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide / diaspora
nationwide; African American English · 1900s
Spoken by
Black Americans in in-group speech; hip-hop; contested and refused by many Black speakers, particularly older ones
$NIGGAThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady126 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
88/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1900
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
■
Geneva Smitherman, Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner, Houghton Mifflin
lexicon · 1994
■
Arthur K. Spears, African-American Language Use: Ideology and So-Called Obscenity, in African-American English, Routledge
linguistics · 1998
■
N.W.A, Straight Outta Compton, Ruthless Records
album · 1988
■
+ Cite a sourceRandall Kennedy, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, Pantheon
book · 2002
See also