How Hip-Hop Changed the English Language Forever (2024)

In 50 years, rap transformed the English language, bringing the Black vernacular’s vibrancy to the world.

We unpacked five words — dope, woke, cake, wildin’ and ghost — that show rap’s unique linguistic influence.

By Miles Marshall Lewis

dope

[doʊp] noun. A recreational drug; adj. Very good.One emblematic use of linguistic transformation in hip-hop is the total inversion of a word’s meaning. Consider “dope,” which apparently originated in the 19th century from the Dutch doop, which means “dipping sauce.” In 1909, “dope” was employed to describe the “thick treacle-like preparation used in opium smoking,” per the Oxford English Dictionary. But “dope” also had another meaning: a stupid person. In the wider culture, stereotypes of Black people as being unintelligent still endured, so it was an act of radical reclamation when, in the 1980s, rappers began to use “dope” to refer to superlative music, lyrics, fashion or anything else considered praiseworthy.

Hip-hop made “dope” — and also the genre at large — the arbiter of cool. And unlike similar inversions like “sick” or “bomb,” its pop-cultural usage as a synonym for “outstanding” persists into the present day.

woke

[‘wok] adj. The state of being aware or conscious.It started as the simple past tense of the word “wake,” meaning the state of being awake, partly from the Middle English wakien. The Pan-Africanist activist Marcus Garvey used aphorisms like “Wake up, Ethiopia! Wake up, Africa!” back in the early 1920s. Eighty years later, on her “MTV Unplugged No. 2.0” album, Lauryn Hill would go on to repeat the same sentiment: “Wake up and rebel/We must destroy in order to rebuild.” The modern sociopolitical application of “woke” was repopularized by the Black Lives Matter movement and the reprise of both protest music and conscious rap that followed in the early 2010s.

The use of the word “woke” in hip-hop lyrics surged once again after the 2016 presidential election of Donald J. Trump: including Kendrick Lamar’s “N95” (“Take off the fake woke”), Joey Bada$$’s “Good Morning Amerikkka” (“Some of us woke while some stay snoozed”), Lil Durk’s “Home Body” (“Stay woke, you can’t take it”), 6LACK’s “Nonchalant” (“Claim they woke but they probably asleep”) and many others. But “woke” soon became a source of derision, as evidenced by comments from the Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis and the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. It remains to be seen whether mockery of the word will cause its use to decline, or whether rap will find ingenious ways to reclaim it.

cake

[keɪk] noun. An item of sweet food, baked and often decorated.Hip-hop has always celebrated booties and invented various euphemisms to refer to them. But this has typically been from the point of view of a male rapper’s sexual fantasies (Sir Mix-a-Lot basically made a career of this). Part of what’s notable about the abundant references to “cake” in hip-hop lyrics of the last decade is how often female rappers are the ones behind the mic. As the culture has adopted a sexual politic that centers female pleasure, and women have become a bigger force in the genre, they have not only taken ownership of their sexuality; they’ve taken back raunch.

In “Girls in the Hood,” Megan Thee Stallion raps, “He call me Patty Cake ’cause the way that ass shake.” Women’s erotic imagination is at the fore in these songs, not men’s, as in “Trollz,” in which Nicki Minaj boasts, “Just put it in his face, all this cake, he wanted a taste.” (Or Rihanna’s simply rapping, “Cake, cake, cake, cake, cake.”) Another variant of this usage is “caked up,” meaning having well-developed gluteal muscles.

wildin’

[waɪldɪŋ] adj. Not cultivated or domesticated; noun. Wild or mischievous behavior.Early definitions of this word, dating back to about 1525, referred to plants growing uncultivated in the wild. In hip-hop’s lexicon, a “wildstyle” referred to an intricate form of graffiti, and in the mid-1980s, “wildin’” became one of many ways to describe someone acting in an uninhibited or reckless manner. Musical evidence of wildin’ surfaces as early as 1988 in Ice-T’s “Radio Suckers” (“Gangs illin’, wildin’ and killin’/Hustlers on a roll, like they got a million”). Sometimes it took a different spelling, as per the debut single from Public Enemy’s former D.J., Terminator X, “Buck Whylin’.” But uninhibited Blackness has always inspired fear in mainstream America, and so this word also came to be used against the community that created it.

During the 1989 Central Park rape case, which resulted in the wrongful convictions of five Black and Latino teenagers, fear-mongering headlines used the word “wilding” to whip up white anxiety about out-of-control Black youth rampaging in the city. Senior detectives claimed that the Central Park Five suspects had used the word to describe their own actions to the police, but this account was questioned by the investigative reporter Barry Michael Cooper, who speculated that a detective may have misunderstood the suspects’ use of the phrase “doin’ the wild thing,” a lyric from the rapper Tone Loc’s 1988 single, “Wild Thing,” which they were reportedly singing while in the holding cell. In 1989, the Oxford English Dictionary added this definition: “The action or practice by a gang of youths of going on a protracted and violent rampage in a street, park or other public place, attacking or mugging people at random along the way.” Today the use of “wildin’” in hip-hop persists as a celebration of wildness, unruliness and boisterousness, a carefully calculated refusal of control. (See A$AP Rocky’s song “Wild for the Night”: “Wilding for the night, [expletive] being polite, boy.”)

ghost

[goʊst] verb. To leave or escape suddenly and discreetly; to disappear.The word “ghost,” used as a noun, derived from the Old English gast, meaning the disembodied spirit of a dead person, began to take on a new meaning in the 1980s: to depart from an area, or “get ghost.” One of the earliest recorded uses of “ghost” in this sense dates back to a 1991 collaboration between the hip-hop duos 3rd Bass and Nice & Smooth on the song “Microphone Techniques”: “Greg Nice, I’m outta here, ghost!” (A related term with a similar definition, “Swayze,” stemmed from the actor Patrick Swayze’s starring role in Hollywood’s 1990 romantic fantasy “Ghost.”)

In its original appearance, “ghost” was an example of the voracious, playful curiosity at the heart of Black vernacular and hip-hop lingo. Like that lingo itself, the phrase pulled from distinct parts of American culture to make something new, eventually giving us a new way to speak about our lives. More recently, driven by social media, “ghosting” has evolved to describe the disappearance of acquaintances or love interests who cut off all communication. It’s part of the lingua franca of modern dating in the Tinder/Bumble era.

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