[Ads-l] Never Mind About "Hoodlum"

[Shapiro, Fred]

Never mind.  I usually check page images of newspapers to make sure the dating is correct, and I did check this one before posting, but now I see that what I was looking at is a page from an 1879 Hawaiian newspaper that somehow got mixed up with pages from an 1859 Hawaiian newspaper.

Fred Shapiro



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From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of Shapiro, Fred <00001ac016895344-dmarc-request at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Monday, April 13, 2026 12:45 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Subject: Major Antedating of "Hoodlum"

I would not usually characterize a seven-year antedating of a word as "major," but I think this one is.  The Oxford English Dictionary, Green's Dictionary of Slang, the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, and researches by myself and Stephen Goranson have presented a picture of "hoodlum" popping up in San Francisco at the end of 1866 (the three dictionaries have it five years later, but I and Stephen found 1866 citations) and quickly becoming a popular term in California.  I have now found an occurrence of the word from Hawaii in 1859.  This seems to be remarkably isolated chronologically, but it clearly shifts the word's origination away from Frisco.

hoodlum (OED 1871)  1859 Commercial Advertiser (Honolulu) 30 June 5/7 (Newspapers.com)  The native Hawaiian hoodlum has taken up a new role ... As we are informed, it is the nightly practice of a lot of these youngsters, (but more especially on Saturday nights) to frequent the Palama road, where, as safe opportunities may occur, they personate policemen, being provided with circular bits of tin fastened on their breasts in imitation of the police badge.

Although this antedating is chronologically surprising, it makes geographic sense that Pacific commerce could disseminate a word from Honolulu to San Francisco.  Perhaps there is some term in the Hawaiian language that was the etymon for "hoodlum."

I think I probably searched for "hoodlum" in Newspapers.com in the past without coming up with the 1859 occurrence.  Maybs the Commercial Advertiser is a recent addition to the database.

Fred Shapiro

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