Entry · catalog no. 9218
tar baby
/ /ˈtɑɹ ˌbeɪbi/ /TAR BAY-bee
noun · US South (enslaved storytellers; printed 1881) · 1880s
✓ Verified
1.
A problem or entanglement that gets worse the more one struggles with it.
“The merger turned out to be a tar baby.”
2.
A figure in the Br'er Rabbit folktale: a doll made of tar that traps Br'er Rabbit when he hits it. Some people unfamiliar with the story hear the phrase as a racial insult, and it has been used that way.
“Br'er Fox built a tar baby to catch Br'er Rabbit.”
Origin & Attribution
The story comes from the oral tradition of Black people enslaved on Southern plantations. Joel Chandler Harris, a white journalist, collected it in dialect and printed it in Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1881); some of the tales ran first in The Atlanta Constitution. Sticky-doll stories turn up in other traditions, including Anansi stories in West Africa and Jamaica and a version recorded in the Bahamas in 1888, and scholars disagree about their spread. Because tar is dark, some hearers read the phrase as a reference to Black people, and politicians have been criticised for using it.
1881
Harris prints Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
US South (enslaved storytellers; printed 1881) · 1880s
Spoken by
Enslaved Black storytellers; later general English speakers
$TARBABThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Fading145 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
20/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1881
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
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1881)
book
■
+ Cite a sourceWikipedia, 'Tar-Baby'; secondary
web
See also