Entry · catalog no. 1026
who dat
/ /huː dæt/ /hoo DAT
interjection · New Orleans, South · 1900s
✓ Verified
1.
A call of collective identity and defiance — "who dat?" thrown out and answered right back. A challenge, a rallying cry, a way a crowd names itself.
“Who dat? Who dat say they gon' beat us?”
Origin & Attribution
Black American speech carried through 19th-century minstrel and vaudeville call-and-response, then jazz and big bands in the 1920s and '30s; it surfaces in Paul Laurence Dunbar's verse and in early New Orleans print as far back as 1852. New Orleans made it a citywide chant, adopted by Saints fans in 1983 on a foundation laid by Black performers a century earlier.
1852
Surfaces in early New Orleans print
1920s-30s
Jazz and big-band call-and-response
1983
Adopted as the Saints chant
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
New Orleans, South · 1900s
Spoken by
Black performers and New Orleans crowds
$WHODATThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady174 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
70/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1852
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
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
Who Dat, Wikipedia — reference · entry
submitted
■
+ Cite a sourcePaul Laurence Dunbar, "Who Dat Say Chicken in Dis Crowd" — song lyric · 1898
submitted
See also