Entry · catalog no. 2844
OG
/ /oʊˈdʒiː/ /oh-JEE
noun · Los Angeles / South Central, spreading nationwide through Black hip-hop networks · 1970s
✓ Verified
1.
A person of proven standing — someone who was there first, put in the years, and earned deference from those who came after. Originally marked rank inside a gang: a founding or elder member whose time in the life outweighed any newer recruit's claim to respect. Carried into wider Black speech, it now names anyone — an elder, a mentor, an artist, a friend — whose experience and authenticity are beyond question, and doubles as a modifier for the first or truest version of anything ('the OG lineup,' 'OG recipe').
“My uncle put me on to this whole business — he's the real OG, been doing this since before I was born.”
Origin & Attribution
Coined in the early 1970s within the Original Gangster Crips of South Central Los Angeles, a Black street organization, where members used the initials as shorthand on writing and graffiti to mark which set they claimed and to assert seniority over newer recruits. Mainstream sources sometimes flatten this into generic '70s slang' or credit its spread solely to Ice-T's 1991 album, but the term functioned as in-group rank-marking among Black Angelenos years before it ever reached record shelves or the internet — the how-to-geek framing of it as merely 'AAVE slang' and dictionary.com sourcing to
1971
Original Gangster Crips in South Central LA use OG as an initialism marking set affiliation and seniority
1980s
Term spreads to rival gangs, including the Bloods, and begins surfacing in West Coast rap
1991
Ice-T's album O.G. Original Gangster reaches #7 on Billboard's rap chart, pushing the term toward mainstream recognition
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The West
Los Angeles / South Central, spreading nationwide through Black hip-hop networks · 1970s
Spoken by
Black Angelenos originally; now spoken widely across Black American communities and adopted into general U.S. slang
$OGThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Enduring55 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
1971
in the culture
Recorded here
2026
point of first record
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
@bayarea
Oakland, CA
@ladi
Los Angeles, CA
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Citations & Sources
■
the term first started being used in the early 1970s by the LA-based Original Gangster Crips
essay/dictionary.com citing Champion & Ross, 2006
■
O.G. Original Gangster by the rapper Ice-T...in 1991 likely contributed to the migration of the word from gang culture to more general use
Merriam-Webster entry
■
+ Cite a sourceAn OG became someone who was deeply devoted to their subset gang, and younger members of the gangs began to use it in reference to the elders
dictionary.com slang entry
See also