Entry · catalog no. 1233
West Hell
/ /ˌwɛst ˈhɛl/ /west-HEL
noun · Gulf South, then nationwide in Black speech · 1930s
✓ Verified
1.
In Black folk geography, a section of Hell beyond the ordinary one, used as the measure of how far or how bad a thing is.
“They shipped the whole company somewhere south of West Hell and told us to be grateful for the ride.”
2.
Loosely, anywhere remote, hard, and unwelcoming.
“That transfer bus runs clean out to West Hell before it turns around.”
Origin & Attribution
Black folk cosmology of the Gulf South — Florida, Alabama, the turpentine and phosphate camps — collected by Zora Neale Hurston in her late-1920s fieldwork and printed in Mules and Men (1935) alongside Ginny Gall, Diddy-Wah-Diddy, and Beluthahatchie. It is a mapped afterlife, told with humor and precision, and it travelled north with the migration. Hurston listed it again in her 1942 Harlem glossary, which is why it is often filed as Harlem slang; the Southern record is seven years earlier and appears in running speech rather than a word list. Note also that the widely circulated gloss "Hell's hottest section" does not match the printed text.
1935
In running speech in Hurston's Mules and Men — four miles south of West Hell
1962
John Oliver Killens, And Then We Heard The Thunder
2002
Touré, The Portable Promised Land
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
Gulf South, then nationwide in Black speech · 1930s
Spoken by
Black Southerners; later Black speakers nationwide, and by the 1970s into general American street fiction
$WESTHEThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Fading91 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
40/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1935
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
@nolakid
New Orleans, LA
@htxdri
Houston, TX
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Citations & Sources
■
Zora Neale Hurston — Mules and Men — book · 1935
Earliest record, in running speech rather than a glossary
■
Zora Neale Hurston — Glossary of Harlem Slang — glossary · 1942
Listed as another suburb of Hell, worse than the original
■
+ Cite a sourceJohn Oliver Killens — And Then We Heard The Thunder — novel · 1962
Somewhere south of west-hell
See also