Jazz

How to spell jazz

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce jazz

What does jazz mean?

1. nounA style of music originating among African American communities, marked by improvisation, syncopated rhythm, and a strong groove.
2. verbTo make something more lively, exciting, or interesting, usually used with 'up'.

Jazz in a sentence

• noun

  The bar hosts live jazz every Friday evening.

• verb

  A bright scarf can jazz up an otherwise plain outfit.

• noun

  She studied jazz piano at the conservatory for four years.

• verb

  They wanted to jazz up the dull presentation with a few graphics.

Where does jazz come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

Jazz is one of the great etymological mysteries of American English, and its origins remain genuinely uncertain. The word surfaced in print around 1912, first in West Coast baseball slang where 'jazz' meant energy, pep, or fighting spirit, and only a little later did it attach itself to the syncopated music emerging from New Orleans. Several theories compete: some trace it to African American vernacular, others to Creole or West African words, and the slang sense carried a now-faded vulgar meaning as well. Because no single ancestor can be proven, careful dictionaries simply label it origin unknown. The doubled 'z' and the snappy single-syllable shape, which is exactly what makes the spelling feel modern rather than borrowed, reflect its birth as fresh American slang rather than an inheritance from Latin or French.

How the word is built

• jazz (single root; no prefix or suffix, an early twentieth-century coinage)