The Oxford Dictionary of African American English (ODAAE), slated for a 2025 release, will include 1,000 headwords, pronunciation audio files, definitions, and parts of speech, plus multiple usage examples. LJ talked with Editor in Chief Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Executive Editors Tracey Weldon and Jennifer Heinmiller about their quest to record the first-of-its-kind, most comprehensive, up-to-date picture of African American English. 

How did the idea for this dictionary come about?

Gates: I am a deeply passionate proponent of African and African American studies. One of the roles that I've been privileged to play—and that has taken several forms most prominently—is building the Department of African and African American studies at Harvard, with the help of extraordinarily talented and supportive administrators. When I was hired in 1991, there was one faculty member there [in that department], and one major. Now we have over 40 professors and a PhD program in African and African American studies both, and the largest African language program in the world. So, when you study the history of the institutionalization of disciplines in the Academy, you realize that certain things are necessary for that discipline to be accepted and for it to grow in the Academy. One of those things is reference tools. Reference tools are crucial.

Among reference tools that are important would be the following: a comprehensive encyclopedia, a comprehensive biographical dictionary, and a dictionary of the language of the people that you're studying.

So, Anthony Appiah and I did Encarta Africana [Encyclopedia of Black History and Culture] with Microsoft in 1999, fulfilling W.E.B. Du Bois’s great dream of publishing and encyclopedia Africana. We did a print version called Africana that same year.

Then Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and I, with Oxford, did the African American National Biography. It's funny. Casper Grathwohl, the reference editor at Oxford, wrote to me and asked if I could suggest 50 more Black subjects to be representative in the American National Biography, the ANB. I wrote him back immediately and said I would be happy to edit the African American National Biography with thousands of names because 50 wasn't going to do it. Oxford consulted, and they went for it.

We followed that up with the Dictionary of African Biography, edited with Emmanuel Akyeampong. Then with Franklin Knight, the Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography. It's all online; we have over 10,000 biographies of Black people, of people of African descent. There are biographical essays about each of them. So, what was left was the Dictionary of African American English.

If you think about it, people express their cultural being through language, and I've been intrigued with the unique usages that African Americans have invented in their own brand of English. American English was rendered in new ways so consistently and richly that scholars, for a long time now, have talked about, under various names, African American Vernacular English. Linguists have a whole history of these names. Not being a linguist, I can just call it whatever I want. But Black English, initially in the 1920s and ‘30s, was just referred to as slang, Negro slang, or jazz.

One dictionary relates these unique usages to jazz. Cab Calloway did a dictionary of jazz slang in in the 1930s. But what they didn't realize is that this was a way for African Americans to express all that was unique about their culture, their cultural selves, their spiritual and metaphysical being in the world. And I was exposed to this.

I mean I grew up in a middle-class home, but my father loved language, and so did my mother. My mother's nickname was Pun, and my father loved double entendres.

So, my parents loved to play cards. They would play pinochle, and they’d play canasta, and of course, bid whist, and bridge, and all these other games with their friends. When I was a little boy; I hadn’t started school. My father would call me over; he’d call me Skippy. They'd all be playing cards, and he'd say, ‘Skippy, how do you spell rat?’

I would say, ‘R-a-t.’

He'd say, ‘No, not that mousey kind of rat, I mean like right [pronounced like rat] now.’

And they would laugh. It took me a while to understand what he was talking about, you know. Like ‘rat now,’ what did he mean?

Then, of course, my interest grew. I love the play on words and Black people’s originality. When you're sitting around the barbershop—and I’m sure the same is true at the beauty parlor—Black people are cracking jokes, all the time. The humor of which is dependent upon double entendres.

When I got to college, you learn that “ofay” was printed in Black newspapers as a coded way of talking about white people. Ofay is pig Latin for foe.

Then you thought, wow, it wasn’t just people on the street. These were well-educated newspaper publishers using coded language.

Then, as I became more familiar with African American history, you realize that many of the great writers in the tradition had been referring to these unique usages for a very, very long time.

Frederick Douglass talks about not knowing the meaning of the Negro spirituals. That, he says, ‘The thought that came up, came out—if not in the word, in the sound.’

He said he was within the circle, and he’s talking about the hermeneutical circle, though he wouldn't have used that word. It’s only when he stepped outside did he realize what these people were saying.

Zora Neale Hurston writes about the spyglass of anthropology. She's trying to collect Negro folklore back in Florida, and she says the discipline of anthropology was fitting her too tightly, like a girdle. She couldn't get people to relate to tales, and she goes on and on about it. She had to take that girdle off.

Well, I got my PhD in English language and literature. That is the title of the major at the University of Cambridge. I have been long fascinated with [James] Murray and the history of the Oxford English Dictionary, the OED. One of the happiest days of my scholarly life was when I was able to get the whole set sent to me. I own that set today, and I revert to it. Now, of course, I use it online.

As soon as I read the account of Murray and how he did the Oxford English Dictionary. I wanted to assemble a team, and, sooner or later, do that.

So, after the success of our series of Black biographical dictionaries, I contacted Casper Grathwohl, and I said, ‘I got a project. I haven't talked to anybody, but I know the time is right. I want to assemble an editorial board composed of linguists who study this through their own disciplinary lens. I want to bring them together; I want to be the editor, and I'm going to go and raise the money, which I did through the Mellon Foundation and through Charlotte Wagner, the philanthropist.

We just got a renewal grant from Mellon, and we're going to bring out this first sophisticated [Oxford] Dictionary of African American English, based on historical principles. That is an official term, and what that means is that just like the OED, our dictionary will list usages in chronological order, as found in printed sources. That is really a lot of fun.

Murray used all of England, really, as his source base; people just submitted entries on cards.

What we’re getting? There's a guy named Fred Shapiro at Yale, who—nearly every week—sends another submission, and he's not even on the editorial board.

I was reading Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's novel, Iola Leroy, and there was a usage of a word.

And I went, wow. I had never heard that word before, and I immediately sent it to Jennifer and Tracey and Casper, and it will be in the dictionary.

The sample entries that have been prepared so far will say this word was used, you know, like “cool.” There are a thousand words that you can think of easily that were invented by Black people, either punning on standard English or turning the meaning of words inside out.

My most important scholarly book, some people would say in my field, was The Signifying Monkey, and it's all about Black people signifying the play of English language, turning it inside out, making it, blackifying it, as it were you know, making it a Black cultural identity beneath the level of standard English. It's like always jumping up over the line and disappearing again, and I love that. The humor, the power, the deeply meaningful nature of African American Vernacular English is its relationship to standard English words, which it’s signifying on. It’s combating them, playing with them, plucking them on the head, and I love that. It shows that African Americans live their lives through language and did so in ingenious ways. So, this is a tribute to what the group that James Weldon Johnson, referring to the anonymous authors of the spirituals, called “O Black and Unknown Bards” in his poem of the same name.Tracey and I are creating a tribute to “O Black and Unknown” linguistic users, “O Black and Unknown” linguistic geniuses!

I'm really, really excited about this project and gratified that Tracey and her colleagues have come on with so much energy and alacrity. We’re heading toward the end.

Tracey, what’s your role in this?

Weldon: I am a member of the advisory board that Skip just talked about. There are 11 of us, all linguists and language scholars who specialize in the study of African American English, African American language. We have sort of served to imagine what this project will look like, sort of big picture. [We’re] thinking about our target audiences; thinking about the breadth and scope of the project but also advising, where we are able, on specific entries, the wording, suggestions for sources, and origins, and the like.

It's an exciting opportunity, I think, for many of us whose work has largely sort of remained within the Ivory tower and our college classrooms, to be able to create a project that will reach out into the homes of everyday people and the speakers who create this beautiful language, that language that Skip just described so wonderfully. So, when I was asked to be a part of this project, they had me at hello! It didn't take any convincing.

Gates: Well, I solicited. I went to different colleagues who are linguists, and I said, if we get the funding for this project, who should be on the editorial board. I consulted with Marcyliena Morgan, a colleague at Harvard, a next-door neighbor in fact, and Geneva Smitherman, a very, very dear friend, who pioneered in definitions of signifying and showing that women signify just like men, that women played the dozens like men do. On everyone’s shortlist was one Tracey Weldon.

Weldon: Not sure how I made it, but I'm happy I made the cut.

Gates: Well, I’m honored to be working with you and these linguists. They're teaching me. As I said, I'm not a linguist. I am a literary scholar. So, philology was part of the classical training of English scholars. So, this is a way of combining the philological tradition in English Studies with cutting-edge work in linguistics, its own field. I’m very excited about that.

Is that what you deem the significance of this particular scholarly work, the research that you're doing?

Gates: Yes. The marriage between literary scholarship and linguistic scholarship is very important, and I can't think of another project like this that brings two fields together like this. Can you, Tracey?

Weldon: It’s the first of its kind and exciting because of that. The team that Jennifer Heinmiller represents the lexicography team is another important component of this, and of course, there’s the art of dictionary making.

Gates: That’s a very important point. Everyone who's tried this before, and you know there are—I don’t know how many—dictionaries of African American slang or African American language. People did it as autodidacts. In effect, they're trying to reinvent the wheel. The first thing that I do is look for the best organization that does, in this case, for language what I want to see done for African American language, right? And that's Oxford, without a doubt. I mean, they are the Rolls Royce of dictionary-making. So, the important thing was to persuade them that this was a good idea and that this should be teed up on their lists of next projects. They understood that right away. They're excited. The OED now has a lot of Black words in it.

Our content will be integrated into the larger database of the OED. The great thing about digital platforms is that it's all virtual, anyway. So, you could organize it as a “Black dictionary,” and you can organize it as part of the larger dictionary of World English, as it were. So, that’s good.

Gates: But I want it to be a book. I want it to be a piece of intellectual furniture, like the World Book Encyclopedia was in the 1950s and the Encyclopedia Britannica for middle-class homes.

My family used the World book, oh my God! We'd be watching TV and we'd run and have arguments, you know, the predecessor to Jeopardy in the 1950s and 1960s. We would look it up in the encyclopedia, and we always had dictionaries. I actually even had a class called Dictionary in the third grade, taught by Mrs. Becker.

I remember; this is a flashback. I haven't thought about this in years. But I remember the wonder of opening a red Webster's Dictionary. Everybody had one in the class, and she picked certain words, and we looked at the etymology. We learned what etymology was.

I also remember a guest lecture. I think I was in the fifth grade. A linguist from the local college came, and he wrote three words on the board: Jeet, something with D-u or something, and Squeat. He asked us what those words meant, and we had no idea. He said, ‘Jeet yet, no Ju?,’ meaning did you eat yet? No, did you? Let’s go eat. We all laughed! I couldn’t wait to get home and tell my mother and father that we played that game. They asked what I was talking about. When I told them, my father cracked up.

So, I was introduced to the magic of language in my home by my mother and father, and particularly my father, who was the original signifying monkey, as far as I'm concerned. Even the phrase signifying monkey is an elaborate pun. It's a punning on the French word for monkey, and the French word for sign: sign and sing. It is just the reversal of two letters.

I mean Black people been signifying since slavery. There's no question about that. But to name that practice the signifying monkey and to create a character, I think that must have come after the soldiers were in France and then came back.

Words like beaucoup bucks and all that stuff has a French base. I can’t prove this, but this is just by theory. But given the pun in French between sing and sign, I think it's reasonable to assume that.

But I think that we use language as self-defense. We use punning as a way to defend ourselves against racism, to defend ourselves against racist aspersions cast on the nature and value of our culture, or the intelligence of individual members of the Black community. So, we were fighting back In the white man's face in a coded language that he or she did not understand, like words like “ofay,” and that's an important aspect of the history of language use by Black people, which we will encode in our etymologies.

Was this scholarly work emotional labor for you? If so, how are you protecting yourself?

Weldon: I have not felt the need to protect myself at all. On the contrary, I have looked forward to every opportunity to turn to this project! This work has been a labor of love for me – love for the creativity, resilience, and boldness that is African American English and love for the community of speakers who keep it alive and vibrant. On many levels, the ODAAE is a love letter to the African American speech community that says we acknowledge you; we celebrate you; and we thank you.

Jennifer,what criteria are you using for word selections, and what was your process of developing that list? 

Heinmiller: The list of candidates for inclusion is ever-growing and we use a host of primary sources (books by Black authors, Black-owned newspapers, music, film, social media, letters, etc.) in our research to compile the headword list, as well as a range of lexicographical sources, such as the OED, the Dictionary of American Regional English, Green’s Slang Dictionary, Major’s Juba to Jive. In addition to these scholarly and primary resources and the original research conducted by our editorial team, in compiling the headword list we evaluate recommendations from our advisory board, a public submission form and suggestions that come in during public PR events, suggestions from friends, family, and professional networks.

Criteria for inclusion is based on a combination of evidence of African American English (AAE) origins; terms/senses that have evidence of originating elsewhere but have become mostly or solely AAE; as well as terms/senses that are particularly significant within Black culture and/or AAE speech communities.

Could you detail the complete process of making an entry, from the point a word is first considered to when the definition is complete?

Heinmiller: A term or sense is assigned to a lexicographer, who creates a definition template and writes some preliminary notes. The editorial team member then works with a member of the research team, and together they investigate examples of the term/sense using real-world evidence such as social media, music, books, film, etc. They compile a list of examples and examine them all to work out the meaning or meanings indicated. The lexicographer then writes a definition and creates the dictionary entry in our editing software. Sometimes, the lexicographer discusses the draft entry with the rest of the lexicography team and research team to get ideas or ask questions. The lexicography team often works together in a workshop format to discuss and polish entries. When entries are drafted, they go through a review process in which lexicographers proofread and edit each other’s work. Then, the entries are reviewed by OED editors who specialize in etymology and bibliography. Next, the executive editor (Jennifer Heinmiller) reviews the entries, which are nearly complete at this point, and makes any remaining editorial revisions. Finally, a finalization team of editors review and provide feedback for the entry, and any final edits are made.The entry is then considered finalized.

How are you handling offensive words?

Heinmiller: No words are excluded due to their sensitive or offensive nature. Offensive words will be clearly labeled, and historical/cultural notes will be incorporated into entries addressing sensitive content.

Gates: If we leave anything out in the first edition, it'll only be that we ran out of time. But no, we're not censoring. I don't believe in censoring. One of the things that I tell students is that if Frederick Douglass called himself colored or a Negro, that’s how I'm going to refer to him. I’m not going to call him an African American because that's anachronistic. Part of the lessons of African American studies have to do with the names that we, our people, called themselves. Also, if a writer uses words that we find offensive, I, as a teacher, am going to read the text exactly as it was written. I’m not going to censor the author. I don't believe in expurgated versions of Huckleberry Finn. That’s not Huckleberry Finn, that’s something else. We just have to get over that.

I don't make my students say a word that they’re uncomfortable with saying. But I’m going to say those words. So, I give them a trigger warning at the beginning of class, and you know what? They applaud. I tell them that you cannot make a mistake here. You're not going to be cancelled. Be free. Don't worry about political correctness because it has no place in the classroom. This is a safe space, and our dictionary, by extension, is a safe space, a safe space of learning.

Weldon: We didn’t censor anything, but it will not be exhaustive. So, the first edition will be about a thousand words. That's the tip of the iceberg. And yeah, the wonderful thing about language in general, but African American English especially, is that it is constantly evolving. So, even as we are creating this dictionary, new words are being created every day. Our hope is that this will be something that we will maintain and continue to build upon for years to come.

Jennifer, could you please discuss how you decided how each entry was going to look (illustrations, multiple definitions, citations, and more)?

Heinmiller: ODAAE’s entry structure follows the established framework of a scholarly historical dictionary. Entries will include a headword, part of speech, definition, and multiple examples of usage pulled from real-world resources (books, newspapers, music, film, social media, etc.) with full citations. Entries will also have audio files for pronunciation.

What primary sources are you using and how?

Heinmiller: Some of the primary sources we frequently reference for examples of use and scholarly commentary come from William Wells Brown, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Martin Luther King, Jr., Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, and August Wilson. We also frequently reference works of African American artists and musicians, including lyrics from jazz, blues, hip-hop, and R&B, and novels, essays, poems, and plays. Additionally, we use historical diaries, letters, slave narratives, church minutes, advertisements, and more in tracing the path of African American English through time. The quotations we use from these sources illustrate the myriad ways in which African Americans have shaped the linguistic fabric of the United States.

Do you see this perhaps becoming a living document that would be updated with additional entries?

Heinmiller: Like the OED, the ODAAE will be updated and revised regularly, becoming a living dictionary project with ever-expanding coverage over time.

What's the ultimate goal for this publication?

Gates: The ultimate goal is respect. I want people to know that our ancestors of African descent were every bit as sophisticated, every bit as intelligent, every bit as innovative culturally and artistically as any other people on the face of the earth.

We've had to fight that battle since the Enlightenment in the 18th century, when many of the greatest thinkers in the Enlightenment said that we were either an inferior species of the human community, or not even full members of the human community. Maybe we were top of the food chain of the animal kingdom because we hadn't created great literature, great writing. This specifically was said by [David] Hume and by [Immanuel] Kant and by Thomas Jefferson, among others. I’ve written about that extensively.

So, I want to show that we were cultural innovators at the level of language, and we have been all along, even from within the depths of enslavement.

My goal is for us to show that our people were every bit as intelligent, innovative, mischievous, humorous, and witty as any other people on the face of the earth.

Weldon: Absolutely. Yeah.

Would you like to add to that, Tracey?

Weldon: I just want to second that. I mean, there has been so much misrepresentation of what African American language actually is. It's ironic, because it is, at the same time it is denigrated, it is celebrated and imitated. So, this is an opportunity to really bring together so many of the words that have had their start in the African American speech community and have contributed to the American lexicon in ways that will surprise many people because they are so much a part of our everyday language. It's so rare that many of these words really get acknowledged as contributions from African American speakers. The fact that it's an Oxford dictionary, I think, will give it the legitimacy that it deserves. That’s what's exciting about this project.

Gates: I agree, Tracey. You made me think of something. I don't know where this came from, but take the word “woke,” which will be there [in the OAAED]. My father used to say to my brother and me that if somebody was slow or said something—I don’t want to use the word “stupid,” but—(laughter) my father would say, ‘Boy, don’t woke ‘em, let ‘em slept.’ We would all laugh. Or somebody would say that in a barber shop. If somebody asked a question like, ‘What is such and such mean? Then the barber would say, ‘Don't woke ‘em, let ‘em slept,’ and that's great, that’s funny.

One more thing. The stereotype of our people is that, from some scholars—I call them the dismal pessimists—was that life was so harsh that we couldn't be creative. We didn't have time to be creative. We were just trying to survive. Nothing could be further from the truth. Within the depths of slavery, we were signifying. We were playing the dozens. We were being witty. We were fighting back. It was a mode of self-defense.

Weldon: It was the language of survival.

Gates: Yes, at the ultimate metaphysical level. We were recreating the world, not only in our own images but also in the timbers of our own voice. That's an amazing contribution to culture, to world culture.