Entry · catalog no. 1239
sounding
/ /ˈsaʊndɪn/ /SOWN-din
noun · Harlem, New York for the term; the practice is nationwide under other names · 1960s
✓ Verified
1.
A structured verbal duel in which two speakers exchange escalating and obviously untrue insults, usually aimed at each others mothers, in front of an audience that judges each hit.
“They were sounding on the stoop for an hour and nobody swung on anybody.”
2.
To sound on somebody — to land a single ritual jab, hitting a known feature of theirs.
“Do not sound on my sneakers when your own are talking.”
Origin & Attribution
Sounding is Black adolescent verbal culture, and sounding is specifically the New York name for it. The practice is old and nationwide and its names are local: the dozens is the oldest general term, with woofing in Philadelphia, joning in Washington, signifying in Chicago, screaming in Harrisburg, cutting or chopping on the West Coast. William Labov's team documented the Harlem form between 1965 and 1968, working with adolescent peer groups and depending on Black participant-observers, especially John Lewis and Clarence Robins, to get material outsiders would never have heard. Labov's finding was that sounding is rule-governed: the insults have to be recognizably false, and when they start being true the frame breaks and the game turns into a fight. That is the opposite of the mainstream assumption that this was undisciplined street talk.
1939
John Dollard publishes the first scholarly article on the tradition, under the older name the dozens, in American Imago
1962
Roger D. Abrahams publishes Playing the Dozens in the Journal of American Folklore, reporting sounding as the favored Philadelphia term
1972
Labov's Rules for Ritual Insults appears as chapter 8 of Language in the Inner City, establishing sounding as a rule-governed speech event
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
Harlem, New York for the term; the practice is nationwide under other names · 1960s
Spoken by
Black adolescent and pre-adolescent boys in New York City in the mid-twentieth century, and the whole tradition under newer names since
$SOUNDIThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Fading64 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
70/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1962
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
■
William Labov, Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972, chapter 8, Rules for Ritual Insults
book
■
William Labov, Rules for Ritual Insults, in David Sudnow, ed., Studies in Social Interaction, New York: Free Press, 1972, pp. 120-169
book chapter
■
Roger D. Abrahams, Playing the Dozens, Journal of American Folklore, vol. 75, no. 297, 1962, pp. 209-220
journal article
■
+ Cite a sourceJohn Dollard, The Dozens: Dialectic of Insult, American Imago, vol. 1, no. 1, 1939, pp. 3-25
journal article
See also