Nobody Knows Where the Word Jazz Comes From

The word "jazz" first appeared in print on March 3, 1912, in the San Francisco Bulletin, in a column by Ernest Hopkins describing the spring training condition of a local baseball team. He used it to mean energy or spirit — something like "pep" or "vim." The music had nothing to do with it.

By 1915, the word had migrated east and attached itself to the music being played in New Orleans dance halls and Chicago venues. How the transfer happened is not documented. The Chicago Daily Tribune used it in a music context in 1915; by 1917 it appeared in the name of the Original Dixieland Jass Band, which made the first commercial jazz recordings.

Etymologists have been chasing the origin ever since. Gerald Cohen and Barry Popik, two scholars who have spent decades on the question, published a detailed study in 2005 arguing for the San Francisco baseball origin and a possible derivation from a slang term for sexual vigor — itself of unknown origin. Others have proposed connections to African languages, specifically the Mandingo word "jasi" (to act out of character) or the Temne word "yas" (to be energetic). A popular folk etymology traces it to a Chicago musician named Jasbo Brown, but no historical evidence of this person has been found.

The American Dialect Society listed "jazz" in 2000 as the word of the 20th century. Its etymology remains officially unresolved. The Oxford English Dictionary marks the origin as "of unknown origin" — a classification it applies rarely and only after exhaustive research.