Entry · catalog no. 3604
pounders
/ /ˈpaʊn.dɚz/ /POWN-derz
noun · Harlem, New York · 1940s
✓ Verified
1.
Police officers, particularly the uniformed ones working a foot beat.
“Two pounders came through the door before anybody could get up from the table.”
2.
Used with the hazard built in: the police as a thing to watch for and to warn about.
“Keep it quiet out front, the pounders been riding this block all week.”
Origin & Attribution
Black Harlem and the Black press, late 1930s into the 1940s. A clipping of beat pounder — the cop who pounds a beat — and street shorthand rather than a coinage from nothing. Correct the attribution that follows this word around: it is usually credited to Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary of 1938, but the Calloway text circulating under that date is the sixth edition of 1944, and there is no confirmation the word appears in the 1938 first edition at all. Calloway said himself that many of his entries first ran in Billy Rowe's column in the Pittsburgh Courier. The Courier is where the earliest verified use sits, on 8 February 1941, which makes Calloway's list a downstream source here rather than the source.
1941
The Pittsburgh Courier prints the earliest verified use on 8 February
1944
The word appears in the sixth edition of Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary, three years after the Black press
1946
Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe use it in Really the Blues
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Harlem, New York · 1940s
Spoken by
Black Harlem — hustlers, musicians, and the Black newspaper columnists who wrote the way the street talked
$POUNDEThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Historical85 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
25/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1941
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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Citations & Sources
■
Pittsburgh Courier, 8 February 1941, p. 7
newspaper
■
Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, Really the Blues, Random House, 1946, p. 32
book
■
+ Cite a sourceJohn M. Murtagh and Sara Harris, Who Live in Shadow, McGraw-Hill, 1959, p. 53
book
See also