Entry · catalog no. 0949
vibe
/ /vaɪb/ /vyb
noun · No single region — carried through Black music and countercultural speech at the same time · 1960s
✓ Verified
1.
The emotional atmosphere a person, place, or thing gives off; the mood you instinctively pick up on.
“I had to leave the party — the vibe was off.”
Origin & Attribution
Vibe is a clipping of vibrations, which had carried a sense of felt, unspoken atmosphere since the nineteenth century and became common currency in the late 1960s across several communities at once — this one does not belong to any single group, and the archive should not claim otherwise. What Black speech did was keep it and make it structural. Reggae built whole records around it, Marley's Rastaman Vibration among them; funk and soul used it to describe what a room was doing; and by 1993 Quincy Jones could name the flagship magazine of Black music Vibe and expect every reader to understand the claim. The correction owed here is not about the 1960s but about the 2020s.
1967
Vibes clipped from vibrations in the instinctive-feeling sense
1976
Bob Marley & The Wailers release Rastaman Vibration, opening with "Positive Vibration"
1993
Quincy Jones founds Vibe magazine, naming a Black music institution after the word
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide / diaspora
No single region — carried through Black music and countercultural speech at the same time · 1960s
Spoken by
Musicians and listeners across soul, funk, reggae, and hip-hop
$VIBEThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady59 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
96/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1967
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
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
Online Etymology Dictionary, "vibe"
dictionary entry
■
"Origins of Vibe and Vibing," A Way with Words, 2020
public radio segment
■
Bob Marley & The Wailers, Rastaman Vibration, 1976
album
■
+ Cite a source"We Changed Culture: An Oral History of Vibe Magazine," Billboard, 2018
magazine feature
See also