Hip, Woke, Cool: It’s All Fodder For the Oxford Dictionary of African American English

A project of Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research and Oxford University Press, the dictionary will not just collect spellings and definitions. It will also create a historical record and serve as a tribute to the people behind the words, said Henry Louis Gates Jr., the project’s editor in chief and the Hutchins Center’s director.

“Just the way Louis Armstrong took the trumpet and turned it inside out from the way people played European classical music,” said Gates, Black people took English and “reinvented it, to make it reflect their sensibilities and to make it mirror their cultural selves.”

The idea was born when Oxford asked Gates to join forces to better represent African American English in its existing dictionaries. Gates instead proposed they do something more ambitious. The project was announced in June, and the first version is expected in three years.

While Oxford’s will not be the first ever dictionary that focuses on African American speech, it will be a well-funded effort — the project has received grants from the Mellon and Wagner Foundations — and will be able to draw on the resources of major institutions.

The dictionary will contain words and phrases that are were originally, predominantly or exclusively used by African Americans, said Danica Salazar, the executive editor for World Englishes for Oxford Languages. That might include a word like “kitchen,” which is a term used to describe the hair that grows at the nape of the neck. Or it could be phrases like “side hustle,” which was created in the Black community and is now widely used.