Entry · catalog no. 1026
who dat
/ /
interjection · New Orleans, South ·
✓ 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.
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide / diaspora
New Orleans, South ·
Spoken by
$WHODATThe Record · cultural traction
▲ 26 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
60/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
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
■
Who Dat, Wikipedia — reference · entry
submitted
■
+ Cite a sourcePaul Laurence Dunbar, "Who Dat Say Chicken in Dis Crowd" — song lyric · 1898
submitted
See also