Question 1

What does “sharp” mean?

Accepted Answer

Dressed well, and dressed deliberately. The dictionaries date this to 1944 and hepster slang. Rudolph Fisher had it in Harlem in 1928.

Question 2

Where does “sharp” come from?

Accepted Answer

Black urban speech of the North — Harlem and Chicago — attested by the late 1920s. The word sharp is Old English and has meant shrewd or keen in general English since the 1600s. That is a different sense. The transfer of the word to dress and personal appearance is a separate development, and every early record of that sense is African American. The first is Rudolph Fisher, the Harlem Renaissance physician and novelist, in the glossary he appended to The Walls of Jericho in 1928: sharp, striking, keen — a beautifully dressed woman is sharp out of this world. Cab Calloway carried it into the Hepster's Dictionary a decade later, but Calloway compiled; he did not coin, and he said so in his own foreword. Chester Himes has the sharp cats in Harlem barber shops in 1957. Edith Folb recorded sharp to the bone among Black Los Angeles teenagers in 1980. One note on the Calloway source: the glossary text reproduced everywhere as 1938 is in fact the 1944 sixth edition — it contains zoot suit and a reference to the draft, neither possible in June 1938.