| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000. |
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| rap4 |
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| PRONUNCIATION: |  r p |
| NOUN: | 1. Slang A talk, conversation, or discussion. 2a. A form of popular music developed especially in African-American urban communities and characterized by spoken or chanted rhyming lyrics with a syncopated, repetitive rhythmic accompaniment. b. A composition or performance of such music. | | INTRANSITIVE VERB: | Inflected forms: rapped, rap·ping, raps
1. Slang To discuss freely and at length. 2. To perform rap music. | | ETYMOLOGY: | Possibly from rap1. | | OUR LIVING LANGUAGE: | The culture of hip-hop has been the source of dozens of words and expressions in American English, of which rap is one of the most familiar. The word is probably a development ultimately of rap meaning “to hit.” It shows up in the early 1900s in the extended meaning “to express orally,” as used by so notable a figure as Winston Churchill in 1933. Over the next few decades it came to mean “to discuss or debate informally,” a meaning that was well established in the African-American community by the late 1960s. A decade later the word was applied to an evolving style of music characterized by, among other things, beat-driven rhymes of an often improvisatory nature. The slang that is integral to the lyrics of rap continues to be a source of borrowings into colloquial American English; recent examples include chill meaning “to calm down,” and diss meaning “to show disrespect to.” These are but the latest examples in a long series of such borrowings from Black English stretching back a century or more, many of them directly from popular music lyrics or from musicians' lingo.
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| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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