Entry · catalog no. 0049
scarf
/ /skɑrf/ /skarf
verb · Harlem and Black Chicago; carried out along the Black newspaper network to Pittsburgh, Baltimore and the South · 1930s
✓ Verified
1.
To eat; to put food away without ceremony. In its earliest Black-press appearances it worked both ways — a scarf was the meal, and to scarf was to sit down to one.
“Let me scarf something before we cut out.”
2.
In the older Harlem construction knock a scarf: to go get yourself fed.
“I'm going to knock me a scarf and then I'll dig you.”
3.
Later and more generally, to eat something up all at once — usually scarf down or scarf up.
“He scarfed down the whole plate before anybody else sat.”
Origin & Attribution
The word comes up out of the Black press in the early 1930s. A slang list in the Baltimore Evening Sun carried it as a word for food in December 1933, and by July 1936 Dan Burley was running it in the Chicago Defender for dining. Burley — a newspaperman and boogie-woogie pianist who wrote for the Defender, the Amsterdam News and the Pittsburgh Courier — carried it through the late thirties and into his own 1944 handbook. The likeliest parent is the older scoff, a nineteenth-century word for eating hard; scarf looks like the Black American reshaping of it. It is worth saying plainly that this is not a surfer word and not a 1960s teen word, whatever the standard etymologies suggest. It was in Black print more than twenty years before that.
1933
A slang list in the Baltimore Evening Sun records scarf as a word for food
1936
Dan Burley runs it in the Chicago Defender for dining
1944
Burley uses it in running prose in his Original Handbook of Harlem Jive
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
Harlem and Black Chicago; carried out along the Black newspaper network to Pittsburgh, Baltimore and the South · 1930s
Spoken by
Black newspapermen, Harlem hepcats, jazz musicians, Black servicemen in the war; later general American
$SCARFThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady93 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
1933
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
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
Evening Sun (Baltimore), 9 Dec.
1933
■
Dan Burley, Chicago Defender, 25 July
1936
■
Dan Burley, New York Amsterdam News, 29 Jan. (knock a scarf)
1938
■
Dan Burley, Original Handbook of Harlem Jive
1944
■
+ Cite a sourceLavada Durst, The Jives of Dr. Hepcat
1953
See also