Entry · catalog no. 7935
steez
/ /stiz/ /STEEZ
noun · New York City · 1990s
✓ Verified
1.
Personal style carried without visible effort — clothes, walk, flow, and attitude in one word. Widely glossed as style with ease.
“You can copy the fit but not the steez.”
Origin & Attribution
Black hip-hop coinage out of New York. On record from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's It's Nasty (1982), carried through the '90s by Method Man and Gang Starr, then adopted by skate and streetwear culture. Hip-hop's word, four decades running.
1982
Kidd Creole raps steez on Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's It's Nasty (Genius of Love)
1995
Method Man runs it on GZA's Shadowboxin'
1998
Gang Starr makes it a thesis: You Know My Steez
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
New York City · 1990s
Spoken by
Black hip-hop, New York first; skate and streetwear culture after
$STEEZThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady44 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
55/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1982
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
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, It's Nasty (Genius of Love) (Sugar Hill)
1982
■
GZA feat. Method Man, Shadowboxin' (Geffen)
1995
■
+ Cite a sourceGang Starr, You Know My Steez (Noo Trybe/Virgin)
1998
See also