Entry · catalog no. 6631

rock

/ /rɒk/ /ROK

verb · U.S. South (blues origin); South Bronx, New York City (hip-hop codification) · 1970s

✓ Verified

To perform, wear, or carry yourself with visible mastery and confidence — whether that means commanding a microphone, wearing a look nobody else could pull off, or simply handling anything, from a job to a relationship, with style. To 'rock' something is to make it undeniably yours in front of an audience.

“He rocked the mic all night till the whole block was hyped, then she walked out rocking a fur coat like she owned the room.”

Origin & Attribution

The verb's rhythmic, performance-based sense comes out of Black blues culture of the 1920s, where 'rock' described the motion and feel of the music and, often, sex — as in Trixie Smith's 1922 recording. Hip-hop MCs in the South Bronx and Harlem took that blues-rooted verb in the late 1970s and turned it into the founding boast of the genre: 'rocking the mic.' From there Black performers extended it outward — rocking the crowd, the flow, the style, the turntables — before it was generalized in the 1990s–2000s into the now-mainstream sense of wearing an outfit well. Mainstream references often t

1922

Blues singer Trixie Smith records "My Man Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll)," cementing rock as a term for rhythmic, charged performance.

late 1970s

South Bronx and Harlem MCs coin "rock the mic" to boast of microphone mastery, the founding phrase of hip-hop's rock vocabulary.

2010

Linguist Ben Zimmer traces the phrase's hip-hop lineage in his "Rock the Mic" column for The New York Times Magazine's On Language series.

Region of origin

West

Midwest

N.East

South

The Northeast

U.S. South (blues origin); South Bronx, New York City (hip-hop codification) · 1970s

Spoken by

Blues singers of the 1920s South; hip-hop MCs and DJs of 1970s–80s New York; carried nationwide by Black performers and

$ROCKThe Record · cultural traction

▲ Enduring

104 yrs

ahead of the mainstream

75/100

peak cultural energy

Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.

Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest

First used

1922

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

@bxgriot

The Bronx, NY

@phillyanne

Philadelphia, PA

Contribute your pronunciation

Citations & Sources

■

Trixie Smith, "My Man Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll)," 1922

blues song

■

Grandmaster Flash memoir describing his Furious Five crew, 2008

memoir

■

Ben Zimmer, "Rock the Mic," On Language column, The New York Times Magazine, July 11, 2010

newspaper column

+ Cite a source