/hɪp/
[noun] The part of the body on either side of the waist, where the top of the leg joins the body. In modern informal use, it also describes someone who is fashionable and aware of the latest trends.
The 'hip' meaning 'cool and aware' may trace back to an opium-smoking posture — lying on one hip to use a pipe.
The word 'hip' referring to the body part is one of the oldest words in the English language, with roots stretching back to Proto-Germanic. The Old English form was 'hype', which described the joint between the thigh and the pelvis. This came from Proto-Germanic *hupiz, which itself connects to Proto-Indo-European *keu-, a root related to the idea of bending or curving. The same ancient root also gave rise to Old Norse 'hup', Old High German 'huf', and Gothic 'hups', showing how widely the word spread across the Germanic language family. It entered Middle English as 'hipe' and gradually settled into the form we use today.
The anatomical sense has remained remarkably stable for over a thousand years, which is unusual in a language as restless and changeable as English. While other body-part words have shifted, blurred, or been replaced by borrowings from Latin or French, 'hip' stayed close to its original meaning and sound. Its cousins in modern German ('Hüfte') and Dutch ('heup') still echo the same ancient shape, like family members who all share a recognisable nose.
The slang sense of 'hip' — meaning fashionable, aware, or in the know — is a much younger and more mysterious creature. It appears in American English in the early 20th century, and its precise origin has been fiercely debated ever since. One popular theory links it to 'hep', a slightly earlier slang word with the same general meaning, which was common in jazz culture around the 1900s. The shift from 'hep' to 'hip' may simply be a natural sound change, the kind of casual drift that happens in living, spoken language.
A more colourful theory traces 'hip' to the Wolof language of West Africa, specifically the word 'hipi', meaning 'to open one's eyes' or 'to be aware'. Wolof was spoken by many enslaved Africans brought to America, and linguists have argued that African languages had a significant but often overlooked influence on African American Vernacular English, from which much jazz and blues slang emerged. If this theory is correct, then every time someone calls a trend 'hip', they are unknowingly drawing on a thread that runs back across the Atlantic to Senegal and Gambia.
A third theory, more colourful still, connects the slang to the image of someone lying on their hip while smoking opium from a pipe — a posture associated with opium dens in 19th-century America. Someone 'on the hip' would be an experienced opium user, and by extension, someone who was experienced, knowing, and worldly. From this, 'hip' may have broadened to describe anyone with street wisdom or cultural awareness. None of these theories has been definitively proved, and the true origin may be a blend of all three influences meeting in the melting pot of early 20th-century American cities.
From the jazz clubs of the 1930s and 1940s, 'hip' spread into mainstream culture, eventually giving birth to the word 'hipster' — first used in the 1940s to describe jazz enthusiasts who considered themselves culturally enlightened, and later revived in the early 21st century to describe a new generation of trend-conscious urban dwellers. The compound 'hip-hop', which emerged from African American communities in New York in the 1970s, also carries the word forward, though its specific coinage is often attributed to the playful, rhythmic language of rapper and DJ Lovebug Starski. So one small, ancient word has lived two completely separate lives — one rooted in the quiet permanence of the human body, the other forever chasing the newest thing.