"Dibs"

My 2012-2013 subscription package for Berkeley Rep arrived in the mail last week. (Highlights: An Iliad, currently at the New York Theater Workshop; and The White Snake, a new offering from the always-spellbinding Mary Zimmerman.) On the back of the subscription form, under the heading “Why You Subscribe,” a bullet point caught my eye:

• Dibs on special events like Robin Williams, John Leguizamo, and David Sedaris.

“Dibs”?

Of course I recognized the word—it’s playground slang for “a claim.” It seemed interestingly informal for a mainstream theater company’s subscription campaign. (But then again: playground, playful, plays!) It got me thinking: where does dibs come from?

The OED, surprisingly, is no help at all here. The only definition it gives for dibs is “a thick sweet syrup made from grape-juice in Eastern countries.” By “Eastern” the OED means “Middle Eastern”; this dibs comes from colloquial Arabic. I recognized it as a cognate of Hebrew dvash = honey. (UPDATE: See Q. Pheevr’s comment, below, for a correction on my OED research.)

I had to turn to American sources to learn more about the dibs I’d known since childhood. The American Heritage Dictionary says dibs is short for dibstones, “counters used in a game,” but doesn’t provide a history or explain dibs’s American-ness. The Online Etymology Dictionary is a little more helpful, giving 1932 as the first documentation of the word—but no indication of where it was published.

Onward to World Wide Words, Michael Quinion’s indispensable (and UK-inflected) online resource. In a 1999 entry, Quinion wrote that the 1932 citation for dibs appeared in American Speech, the journal of the American Dialect Society—which means only that some academic had finally gotten around to noticing it. “It comes into existence seemingly fully formed, with no obvious links to any previous meaning of the word,” Quinion observes acerbically, adding: “That’s hardly likely, of course.” As for the putative origin, dibstones, that word “is obscure to the point of terminal murkiness.”

Perhaps you’ve wondered whether dibs and divvy—as in “divvy it up”—were connected. That’s the theory Leo Rosten advances in The Joys of Yiddish, in his entry for pushke (a can kept in every home for charitable contributions). Rosten says dibs and divvies are not Yiddish but Chicagoese, used interchangeably “for anything to be divided up.”

I approached the Wikipedia entry for dibs with the necessary trepidation, but was pleased to discover that it is informative and well annotated. One of its sources is “No One Seems to Have Dibs on Word’s Origins,” a 2005 Chicago Tribune column by Eric Zorn with all sorts of fascinating lore about dibs and other slang terms for claims. Zorn writes that the Random House Dictionary says dibs probably came from dubs, “a shortened form of ‘double’ that's used in marbles ‘to claim two or more marbles knocked out of the ring by the same shot.’”

Also in the Wikipedia entry:

• A 1937 edition of Webster’s Dictionary connects dibs to the game of jacks (which is probably similar to dibstones).
• “In Boston, Chicago, and Pittsburgh, ‘dibs’ also refers to the practice of holding a shoveled-out parking space after a heavy snowfall by putting chairs, laundry baskets, or other items in the street to mark the claimed space.”
• “In the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia, ‘bags’, ‘tax’ or ‘bagsie’ (or variants including ‘begsie’ and ‘bugsy’) is used to the same effect.”
• “The Scout movement has a similar phrase which is not linked to ‘dib’, but is actually ‘dyb’. DYB is an acronym for ‘Do Your Best’, and is used as a challenge which is responded to with DOB – Do Our Best.”
• In Spain, the equivalent to dibs is primer (“first”)—but next door in Portugal it’s dibs! Dibs is also used, untranslated, in Israel, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

Finally, I would be remiss not to mention the New England variation on dibs that I learned from blogger/Internet friend Karen Wise: hi-hosey. Naturally, no one knows for sure where that term came from, either.

UPDATE #1: I neglected to mention a commercial use of dibs: 1stdibs.com, an online marketplace for antiques, semi-antiques, and other beautiful things “in the realm of the ludicrously expensive,” as Steven Kurutz put it in the New York Times last September.  

UPDATE #2: Separated by a Common Language published a wonderful post in 2010 about bags, dibs, and shotgun. Author Lynneguist says it’s one of her most-read entries by people outside the US and UK. (Thanks to @BabyNameWizard for reminding me!)

Comments

[Q. Pheevr]

The OED does actually have "dibs," or at least the online version that I have access to does. It's listed under "dib," though, so it doesn't come up if you do a regular search on "dibs."

The OED's citations for the game of dibs ("prob. a familiar shortening of dibstones") all seem to be English, but its examples of sense b ("A children's word used to express a claim or option on some object") are American:

* 1932 Amer. Speech VII. 401 Dibs, interj., an interjection giving option on first chance or place. `Dibs on that magazine when
you're through.' `Dibs on going with the team if there's room.'
* 1943 Amer. N. & Q; III. 139/1 If a sprout came out of the house with some candy or an apple and saw a couple of friends who
might have an interest in his prize, the only sensible thing for him to do was to cry `No dibs!' before they could say `I/We
got dibs!'
* 1953 L. M. Uris Battle Cry iii. i. 197 Two bottles of beer were issued to all enlisted men...`Dibs on your beer, Mary'. `Two
lousy bottles, can they spare it?'
* 1954 E. Eager Half Magic iv. 69 You always get dibs on first 'cause you're the oldest.
* 1985 New Yorker 29 Apr. 71/3 Patterson took care to remember..which upstream banks had dibs on which borrowers.

[rootlesscosmo]

On my Morningside Heights block, kids in the 40's-50's said "fins," which was understood as short for "fingers"--there was a two-finger sign that could be used while saying "fins," though as I recall it wasn't obligatory. I learned "dibs" from California-born contemporaries after I moved here in 1958.

[Nancy Friedman]

@Q. Pheevr: I used the online OED, too, but it never occurred to me to search "dib" because I've never seen it used in the singular. Curious that the entry for "dibs" doesn't cross-reference "dib." But hey, any entry that cites Edward Eager's "Half Magic" is OK by me.

@rootlesscosmo: Leo Rosten touches on "fins" (or "fen") in the entry I mention: "When we saw a pal pick up a coin or other object, we would scream 'Fen dibs!' 'Fen dibby!' or 'Fen divvies!'" American slang "fin" for "five dollars" comes from Yiddish "finif" = "five."

[Bob Cumbow]

I remember as a kid growing up in the 50s hearing and saying "dubs" ... as in "Dubs on the front seat" or "I've got dubs on the upper bunk." It wasn't until the late 50s that I began to hear "dibs." Now the old "dubs" that I remember seems to have been completely replaced by "dibs." I wonder if anyone else reading this even remembers "dubs"; and I also wonder if this is a case of one regionalism being replaced by another. Anyway, the fact that I distinctly remember "dubs" (this would have been in MD, VA, and NC during the period 1952-58) may give a clue as to where else to look for the origin of this term. "Dubs" could easily have come from "I dub thee ..." and "dibs" could simply be a subsequent corruption of "dubs".

[Q. Pheevr]

I don't know about the connection to knighting, but the OED's entry for "dubs" (not under "dub"; go figure) has a few examples that make it look like a potential source:

dubs dAbz. local. Short for doubles. A term used in various senses in the game of marbles (see quots.).
* 1823 E. Moor Suffolk Words s.v., A player knocking two out of the ring cries `dubs!' to authorize his claim to both.
* 1882 M. H. Foote Led-Horse Claim iv. 62 `What is it the boys say when they play marbles?'..`Fend dubs?' Hilgard suggested.
* 1896 Dialect Notes I. 220 In Missouri..dubs means, not doublets, but that the player has blundered, and by crying `dubs' is
entitled to play again.
* 1941 Baker Dict. Austral. Slang 26 Dubs, marbles which are placed in a ring in a game of marbles.

Schoolchildren, check. Establishing a claim, check. Looks promising.

[Mark Gunnion]

Shotgun!

[Mark Gunnion]

And moreso than any kind of dibs, I think, "shotgun" was never open to appeal or argument. My high school friends and I used to consider it the cruelest, most stylish way to "burn" a friend - to be walking towards the parking lot after school, catch your friend's eye, point at them, nod your head, and say, "Shotgun!" just one millisecond before they realized what you were about to say, too late for them to say it before you did. Ah what a sweet victory that was! To see their crushed, anguished faces as they were consigned to squeeze in with the other 3 or 4 ride-moochers in the back seat.

[Tom Goodwillie]

I've never heard "dubs".

Growing up I occasionally heard the word "dibs" from my parents, but hardly from anyone else. To me it felt like somewhat dated slang, something that had been current when they were children -- one in the Chicago area and one in upstate NY -- both born 1926. So I don't think "dibs" was a 1950s variant of "dubs".

Later I learned "hosey" or "hi-hosey" (I have heard both forms) from contemporaries of mine who grew up around Boston.

[Amy Lauren]

The entry for "dib" in the Dictionary of American Regional English includes 1930 DN 6.80 cSC "I've got dibs on that" means "I speak for that; it is mine." Common.

I take this to mean that vol 6, issue 80 [or issue 6, page 80?] of Dialect Notes, published in 1930, states that the usage in common in central South Carolina. There is also a ref to a WELS (Wisconsin English Language Survey) entry from 1950 with the same meaning.