Entry · catalog no. 7401
pad
/ /pæd/ /PAD
noun · Harlem, New York City · 1930s
✓ Verified
1.
A bed — and from there, the place you sleep: a room, an apartment, a home. Cab Calloway's dictionary gave it one word: bed. The mainstream later moved in and kept the whole apartment.
“I finaled to my pad about three in the morning.”
Origin & Attribution
Harlem jive of the 1930s. Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary (1938) sets it down plainly: "pad: bed." The word had run in underworld cant for generations, but it was Black swing-era Harlem that carried it into American speech — the Beats borrowed it from jazz circles, and by the 1960s the mainstream had settled on pad as the word for home.
1938
Defined in Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary
1950s
Beat culture borrows the word from jazz circles
1960s
Mainstream English settles on pad for home
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
Harlem, New York City · 1930s
Spoken by
Harlem swing musicians and hep cats
$PADThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady88 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
70/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1938
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
@bxgriot
The Bronx, NY
@phillyanne
Philadelphia, PA
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Citations & Sources
■
Cab Calloway, Hepster's Dictionary: Language of Jive
1938
■
+ Cite a sourceThe New Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary
1944
See also