Entry · catalog no. 0357
simp
/ /sɪmp/ /SIMP
noun · Oakland, the Bay Area and Los Angeles; first documented in Black campus speech in the Northeast · 1960s
✓ Verified
1.
A man who is excessively, self-abasingly devoted to a woman — doing too much, giving too much, expecting little back. From simpleton.
“He bought her a car after two dates, straight simp.”
Origin & Attribution
Simp has two histories that eventually met. The older one is a plain clipping of simpleton, in American print from 1909, meaning a fool. The one that matters for this entry is Black: a man who abases himself for a woman's attention, defined against the figure of the pimp. Green's Dictionary of Slang finds it already in circulation in a 1967–68 Brown University slang survey and labels the verb US Black, and by the 1980s it was standard equipment in West Coast rap — Too $hort, Hugh-E. M.C., E-40 — where a simp was a counterfeit player, a man performing a role he could not fill. Manosphere forums adopted it around 2012 and TikTok discovered it in 2019, and press coverage that year credited both with inventing something more than half a century old.
1967
Brown University's College Undergraduate Slang Study records simp: be excessively submissive to your girlfriend
1985
Too $hort begins using simp on record; he later defines it as the opposite of the pimp, a knockoff pimp
2019
TikTok's Simp Nation trend presents the word to a mostly white teenage audience as though it were new
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The West
Oakland, the Bay Area and Los Angeles; first documented in Black campus speech in the Northeast · 1960s
Spoken by
Black men in the pimp-and-player rap traditions; Black college students; later teenagers and gamers nationwide
$SIMPThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady59 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
92/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1967
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
@bayarea
Oakland, CA
@ladi
Los Angeles, CA
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
Green's Dictionary of Slang, "simp, v." sense 2 and "simp, n."
historical slang dictionary
■
"A Short History of the Word Simp," The New York Times, 2020
newspaper feature
■
+ Cite a sourceMerriam-Webster, "simp" slang entry
dictionary entry
See also