Entry · catalog no. 1218
tag
/ /tæɡ/ /TAG
noun, verb · Philadelphia and New York City, spreading nationally and then worldwide · 1970s
✓ Verified
1.
A graffiti writer's chosen name rendered as a quick handwritten signature, usually in marker or spray paint, on a wall, a truck, a mailbox or a subway car. A tag is not a picture of anything; it is a name, and the craft is in the hand, the flow of the letters and the placement. Volume and reach matter as much as style, because the point is to be seen citywide by people who will never meet you.
“His tag was on every lamppost between the school and the train.”
2.
To write that signature on a surface.
“They tagged the back of the bus while it sat at the light.”
Origin & Attribution
The practice belongs to Black and Puerto Rican teenagers in Philadelphia and then New York City in the late 1960s and 1970s. Darryl McCray of Brewerytown, Philadelphia, writing as Cornbread from the mid-1960s, is the earliest documented writer to put a chosen name up repeatedly and citywide for its own sake. In New York the practice spread after The New York Times ran a piece on TAKI 183 on 21 July 1971, and the vocabulary of the culture, including tag, was set down by writers themselves and recorded by outsiders in Craig Castleman's Getting Up in 1982, in Style Wars in 1983 and in Subway Art in 1984. TAKI 183 was a Greek American teenager and the culture was never racially exclusive, but the received story that New York graffiti began with a Manhattan messenger boy in 1971 erases the Black Philadelphia writer who was doing it years earlier and the Black and Puerto Rican train writers who built everything after.
1971
The New York Times covers TAKI 183 and the practice spreads across the five boroughs
1982
Craig Castleman's Getting Up records the writers' own vocabulary in print
1984
Subway Art and the PBS broadcast of Style Wars carry the culture worldwide
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
Philadelphia and New York City, spreading nationally and then worldwide · 1970s
Spoken by
Graffiti writers; Black and Puerto Rican youth in Philadelphia and New York; now a global writing culture
$TAGThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady55 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
80/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1971
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
■
Taki 183 Spawns Pen Pals, The New York Times, 21 July 1971
newspaper · printed
■
Craig Castleman, Getting Up: Subway Graffiti in New York, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1982
book · printed
■
Style Wars, directed by Tony Silver, produced with Henry Chalfant, 1983; broadcast on PBS 18 January 1984
film · video
■
+ Cite a sourceMartha Cooper and Henry Chalfant, Subway Art, Thames and Hudson, 1984
book · printed
See also