Entry · catalog no. 1229
sooner
/ /ˈsunər/ /SOO-nuhr
noun · US South and South Midland; carried to Harlem · 1940s
✓ Verified
1.
Something cheaply made or of no fixed breed; then a person who looks the same way — run-down, unkempt.
“That was a sooner coat, all lining and no wool.”
2.
Of a dog: a mutt, so called because it would sooner eat than fight and sooner lie down than work.
“Granddaddy kept a sooner hound that never treed a thing in its life.”
Origin & Attribution
Not a Black coinage, and the entry should not pretend otherwise. It is a rural Anglophone term built on the phrase "would sooner" — a creature that would sooner do the easy thing — in Australian print by 1889 and settled into the US South and South Midland as "sooner dog," documented by the Dictionary of American Regional English. What is Black is the extension: Black Southern speakers carried it north, and by 1942 Hurston recorded a specifically Harlem sense — anything cheap and mongrel, and a person who looks it. Green's Dictionary of Slang marks that sense US Black. It is not related to the Oklahoma Sooner, a settler who crossed into the 1889 land run early; that is a separate word from a separate sense of "soon," and it is the usual mistaken derivation.
1889
Earliest print record of the mongrel-dog sense, in a Sydney paper — the word is not American in origin
1942
Hurston records the Harlem sense: anything cheap and mongrel, a shabby person
1985
Still in circulation in American song text
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
US South and South Midland; carried to Harlem · 1940s
Spoken by
Southern and South Midland speakers, Black and white; the cheap-and-mongrel extension recorded from Black Harlem speech
$SOONERThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Historical84 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
1942
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
@nolakid
New Orleans, LA
@htxdri
Houston, TX
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Citations & Sources
■
Zora Neale Hurston — Glossary of Harlem Slang — glossary · 1942
The Black American sense; marked US Black in Green's Dictionary of Slang
■
Dictionary of American Regional English — "sooner dog" — reference · ongoing
South and South Midland, with an east Tennessee field recording
■
+ Cite a sourceG. Logsdon — Whorehouse Bells Were Ringing — book · 1985
Late citation in Green's
See also