Entry · catalog no. 4203
the Big Apple
/ /ðə ˌbɪɡ ˈæpəl/ /thuh BIG AP-ul
noun · New Orleans to Harlem · 1920s
✓ Verified
1.
New York City. Originally narrower: the New York tracks as the summit of horse racing, then the city as the summit of anything worth being the best at.
“There is only one Big Apple. That is New York.”
2.
In jazz usage, Harlem and New York as the top of the music world — the place you had to play if you meant to be counted.
“Apple — the big town, the main stem, Harlem.”
Origin & Attribution
Black stablehands and grooms on the Southern racing circuit, around 1920, at the Fair Grounds in New Orleans. The white sportswriter John J. Fitz Gerald is routinely credited with coining it. He did not, and he said so himself: in the New York Morning Telegraph of 18 February 1924 he explained that he had overheard the phrase from "two dusky stable hands" cooling out thoroughbreds in New Orleans. Black horsemen carried it north; Harlem musicians made it mean the music capital, which is the sense Cab Calloway defined in 1938. In 1971 the city convention bureau revived it as a marketing asset and produced a tidy origin blurb of its own. Two footnotes the archive rejects: the 1909 Edward Martin line about the big apple taking a disproportionate share of the national sap is a metaphor about greed, not a nickname; and the Big Apple dance out of Columbia, South Carolina in 1936 was named after the phrase, not the other way round.
1920
Overheard from Black stablehands at the Fair Grounds, New Orleans
1924
Fitz Gerald prints the explanation and names his source
1971
The city convention bureau adopts it as a tourism campaign
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
New Orleans to Harlem · 1920s
Spoken by
Black Southern racetrack labor, then Harlem jazz musicians
$THEBIGThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Enduring105 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
95/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1921
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
■
"Around the Big Apple," John J. Fitz Gerald, New York Morning Telegraph — newspaper · 18 Feb 1924
researched
■
New York Morning Telegraph, first casual print use — newspaper · 3 May 1921
researched
■
Cab Calloway's Cat-ologue: A Hepster's Dictionary — June 1938 (entry: Apple)
reference
■
+ Cite a sourceOrigin of New York City's Nickname "The Big Apple," Gerald Cohen and Barry Popik — scholarship · 1991, rev. 2011
book
See also