Entry · catalog no. 7408
out of pocket
/ /ˌaʊt ə ˈpɑkɪt/ /out-uh-POCK-it
adjective · Black America, nationwide · 1940s
✓ Verified
1.
Out of line — saying or doing what the situation's code forbids. The old street senses are precise: in pool-hall talk, a shot gone wrong; in the pimping world, a person moving outside the rules they agreed to live under. The modern use keeps the judgment: not just wrong — outside the boundaries.
“You were dead out of pocket for bringing that up at the repast.”
Origin & Attribution
Black American speech dating to at least the 1940s — slang dictionaries trace it to AAVE pool-hall talk, where a ball out of pocket is a shot gone bad. It hardened in the street and pimp vernacular that Iceberg Slim documented in Pimp: The Story of My Life (1967), where being out of pocket meant violating the code. It passed through hip-hop into general Black usage decades before social media filed it under "internet slang."
1940s
AAVE pool-hall sense recorded in slang dictionaries
1967
Iceberg Slim documents the street code sense in Pimp
2020s
TikTok-era crossover as the default word for out of line
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Black America, nationwide · 1940s
Spoken by
Black street and pool-hall vernacular; now general
$OUTOFPThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Rising59 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
80/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1967
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
■
Iceberg Slim, Pimp: The Story of My Life
1967
■
+ Cite a sourceGreen's Dictionary of Slang, AAVE citations
1940s
See also