In a recent online presentation, the editors and researchers working on an African American English dictionary, the first of its kind, provided an update on the status of the project. As the academics explained their various methodologies, the slides behind them displayed words more often associated with Twitter than Oxford: “Bussin,” the virtual assistants were told, means impressive or tasty, while ” boo” is a lover.

Those were two of the first 100 words that Oxford University Press said it had prepared to include in the Oxford Dictionary of African American English, the hopeful result of the three-year research project. Announced Last spring.

The researchers say they aim to publish a first batch of 1,000 definitions (some words and phrases will have more than one) by March 2025. But the most important goal of the project, which will be edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., an African-American history scholar at Harvard University, is to underscore the importance of African-American English and to create a resource for future research on black speech, history, and culture. Among his other trusts, Professor Gates is something of a dictionary nerd.

“When I was in third grade, we studied the dictionary,” he said in a recent interview. “We had a unit on how to use Webster’s dictionary, and even then, in third grade, that means I was 8 years old, I thought the dictionary was magic.”

Professor Gates now collects and treasures rare and historic dictionaries, including one he bought in the early days of the pandemic, when the future didn’t seem as solid as it once did.

“I was sitting here in this kitchen, taking refuge, doing a Zoom,” he recalled. “I told him, ‘You know what? We could die at any moment. I’m going to buy a first edition of the samuel johnson dictionary.’”

To support their etymological claims, researchers and editors at Oxford Languages ​​and Harvard University Hutchins Center for African and African American Research they have drawn inspiration from jazz, hip-hop, blues, and R&B lyrics, as well as letters, diaries, newspaper and magazine articles, Black Twitter, slave narratives, and abolitionist writings. Individual entries will be explained using quotes from black literature, including examples from Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Martin Luther King Jr.

One of the main challenges for researchers is finding black sources to confirm the use of the words.

“The further back in history, the less we can find that blacks have an influence on how we are written,” said Bianca Jenkins, a lexicographer working on the project. “Because of slavery, the law prevented blacks from receiving an education, from being taught to read. We blacks really had to take responsibility and educate ourselves.”

But it is not simply the words that appear in letters, books, poems and letters. It is also about the words that were transformed into other pronunciations and evolved to have a veiled meaning, for the safety of blacks.

Blacks take language and “wrap it around themselves,” Professor Gates said. “They turn words around.”

“We are endlessly inventive with language, and we had to be,” he continued. “We had to develop what scholars of literature call two-voice speech. We had to learn to speak the teacher’s language, then you had to learn to speak low teachers so you could have a coded way of speaking English that would allow you to express your feelings without being killed, flogged, or worst case scenario, without being lynched.”

The dictionary will exist as a living record long after March 2025 has come and gone: according to Professor Gates, the public will continue to be able to suggest entries for consideration even after the publication of the first edition. Professor Gates recalled asking his cousin, who fought in the Vietnam War, to add a few words. He presented 200, Professor Gates said, his wide grin revealing the apples of his cheeks.

In April, Oxford Languages ​​and the Hutchins Center shared 10 entries with The New York Times. Below are selected definitions, variant forms, and etymologies.

• business (adjective and participle): 1. Especially describing the food.: tasty, delicious. Also more generally: impressive, excellent. 2. Description of a party, event, etc.: busy, crowded, lively. (Variant forms: bussing, bussin’.)

• grill (noun): A removable or permanent dental covering, usually made of silver, gold, or other metal and often inlaid with precious stones, worn as jewelry.

• Promised land (n.): A place perceived as where enslaved people, and later African-Americans in general, can find refuge and live in freedom. (Etymology: a reference to the Biblical story of the Jewish people seeking freedom from Egyptian slavery.)

• chitterlings (n. plural): A dish made from pork intestines that are typically boiled, fried, or stuffed with other ingredients. Occasionally also pork tripe as an ingredient. (Variant forms: chinchulins, chinchulins, chinchulins, chinchulins.)

• kitchen (n.): The hair at the nape of the neck, which is usually shorter, curlier, and more difficult to style.

• cakewalk (n.): 1. A contest in which blacks performed a stylized walk in pairs, usually judged by a plantation owner. The winner would receive some kind of cake. 2. Something that is considered easy to do, as in This job is a piece of cake.

• Old School (adj.): Characteristic of early hip-hop or rap music that emerged in New York City between the late 1970s and mid-1980s, often including the use of couplets, funk samples and disco, and funny lyrics. It is also used to describe the music and artists of that style and time period. (Variant form: old school.)

• pat (verb): 1. transitive. Touch (the foot) to the rhythm of the music, sometimes as an indication of participation in religious worship. 2. intransitive. Usually from the foot of a person: to play in rhythm with the music, sometimes to demonstrate participation in religious worship.

• Aunt Hagar’s Children (n.): A reference to blacks collectively. (Etymology: Probably a reference to Hagar in the Bible, who, with his son Ishmael, was expelled by Sarah and Abraham [Ishmael’s father]and became, among some black communities, the symbolic mother of all Africans and African-Americans and of black femininity).

• ring cry (n.): A spiritual ritual involving a dance where participants follow one another in the form of a ring, shuffling and clapping their hands to accompany the singing and chanting. The dancing and singing gradually intensify and often conclude with the participants exhibiting a state of spiritual ecstasy.

In addition to appearing in the Oxford Dictionary of African American English, the entries will also be added to the broader word bank of the Oxford English Dictionarysaid Professor Gates.

“That’s the best of both worlds, because we want to show how black English is part of the larger English, as they say, spoken around the world,” he said.

More than just a collection of words, Professor Gates said, the new dictionary will serve as a record of the ways blacks have shaped the English language to protect themselves and also maintain some autonomy in a world where they would have nothing. .

“Everyone has an urgent need for self-expression,” he said, adding: “You need to be able to communicate what you feel and what you think to other people in your speech community.

“That’s why we reshaped the English language.”