Jamaican Patois words, grouped the way an ordinary day groups them

Most Jamaican Patois words came from English, which is why a first-time listener recognises a great many of them and still cannot follow the conversation. The vocabulary worth learning first is not the colourful part: it is the handful of small words — mi(mi)— I, me, yuh(yu)— you, dem(dem)— they, them, di(di)— the — that appear in every sentence anybody says. What follows is close to two hundred words grouped the way an ordinary day groups them, each one with the spelling people actually write, the spelling that tells you how it sounds, and what it means.

Where to start, and in what order

An alphabetical word list is the wrong shape for this language, because it puts the rarest word next to the commonest and gives you no reason to prefer either. Learn in this order instead.

Start with the function words. There are perhaps twenty of them and they carry the whole grammar: the pronouns, the article, the little markers that put a verb in the past or the future. Twenty words gets you the skeleton of every sentence you will hear, and the skeleton is what your ear needs before it can catch anything hung on it. They are grouped near the bottom of this page, and the guide to Patois pronouns takes the pronoun set slowly.

Second, learn the words for people and the words for addressing them. Jamaican speech is unusually rich here, and getting an address term wrong is the mistake most likely to be noticed. Third, take one domain that matches your actual life — food if you are visiting, family if you are calling relatives, money if you are buying anything — and learn it properly rather than skimming five domains at once.

Fourth, and this is the part nobody tells you, spend real attention on the words that look like English and are not. They will cost you more misunderstandings than every unfamiliar word put together, because an unfamiliar word announces itself and a familiar one does not.

Everything below assumes you can read the second column. It is Cassidy/JLU, a phonemic system in which one letter always makes one sound, and it exists so a written word can tell you its own pronunciation without a recording. If it looks alarming, the guide to the Cassidy writing system explains it in one sitting, and why Patois is spelled two ways explains why both columns are here at all.

The words that look like English and are not

This is the single most useful section on this page. Every word below is an English word that Patois has kept and repurposed, so you will hear it, understand it, and be wrong.

Patois words that look like English and mean something else

Patois	Written (Cassidy)	English
Bright	brait	Bold, forward, cheeky
Wicked	wikid	Excellent
Bad	bad	Impressive, formidable
Rude	ruud	Unruly, or risqué — rarely just impolite
Fresh	fresh	Too forward with somebody, or smelling off
Tan	tan	To stay, or to stand
Sweet	swiit	To please or delight somebody
Fool fool	fuul fuul	Thoroughly foolish
Mash up	mash op	Wrecked, broken, ruined

A child called bright(brait) is being told off, not praised. A tune described as wicked(wikid) is a compliment, and so is a dancer who is bad(bad). The same reversal — a word for something awful doing duty as strong approval — has happened in more than one variety of English, which is why these two feel half-familiar rather than foreign. Something that sweet(swiit) you has pleased you, and the verb takes the person as its object, so a sentence about being delighted looks to an English eye like a sentence about sugar.

Reduplication is doing real work in the eighth row. Saying a word twice is not baby talk and it is not decoration; it intensifies the meaning or spreads it out, and it is a pattern found across West African languages and across the Atlantic creoles. Once you notice it you will hear it everywhere.

Three more that are safer described than tabulated. ignorant— quick to anger in Patois says nothing about how much somebody knows — it describes a short temper. craven— greedy means greedy rather than cowardly. miserable— mischievous, of a child, said of a child, means lively and troublesome rather than unhappy. We have left the pronunciation spellings off those three deliberately, because the vowels vary from speaker to speaker and printing one would tell you something firmer than the truth.

Words for people, and how you address them

A striking share of Patois social vocabulary is about placing somebody: their age, their standing with you, whether they have earned familiarity. English mostly does that with tone. Patois does it with words, and the words are not interchangeable.

Words for people, and terms of address

Patois	Written (Cassidy)	English
Man	man	A man; also a general address between men
Bwoy	bwai	A boy or a young man
Gyal	gyal	A girl or a woman
Ooman	uman	A woman
Yout	yuut	A young man
Pickney	pikni	A child
Smaddy	smadi	Somebody
Frien	fren	A friend
Bredrin	bredrin	A close male friend
Sistren	sistren	A close female friend
Nayba	nieba	A neighbour
Missis	misis	A married woman; a polite address

Two of those repay attention. yout(yuut)— a young man is used to and about young men by people who are not related to them, and it is neutral — a vendor will use it to a stranger. bredrin(bredrin) and sistren(sistren) name your circle rather than your siblings; both came into general use through Rastafarian speech and then spread well beyond it, which is a pattern you will meet again in the section on approval.

The family words

Kinship terms are the highest-value vocabulary on this page for anybody with Jamaican relatives, and the reason is that they do not map cleanly onto the English ones.

Family words in Jamaican Patois

Patois	Written (Cassidy)	English
Madda	mada	Mother
Faada	faada	Father
Bredda	breda	Brother, or a close male friend
Sista	sista	Sister
Granny	grani	Grandmother
Auntie	aanti	Aunt, and any close older woman
Uncle	ongkl	Uncle
Cousin	kozn	Cousin
Dawta	daata	Daughter; also a young woman
Baby	biebi	Baby
Wife	waif	Wife
Husban	hozban	Husband

The kinship word tends to follow the relationship that was actually performed rather than the biological one, so a grandmother who raised a child is very often that child's madda(mada) and is addressed that way for life. You therefore cannot deduce a family tree from the terms you hear, and you should not try. The full account, including who you may call by a first name and who you may not, is in talking about family.

Notice the ending on the first four rows. Where English writes an unstressed -er, Patois says and writes -a. That one pattern will decode dozens of words you have not met yet.

The body, and saying where it hurts

Two of these words cover more ground than their English counterparts, which is a small fact with real consequences in a clinic or on the phone to a relative.

The body and health

Patois	Written (Cassidy)	English
Head	hed	Head
Yeye	yai	Eye
Nose	nuoz	Nose
Mout	mout	Mouth
Teet	tiit	Teeth
Neck	nek	Neck
Han	han	The hand, and the whole arm
Foot	fut	The foot, and the whole leg
Belly	beli	Stomach
Back	bak	Back
Skin	skin	Skin
Sick	sik	Unwell
Feva	fiiva	A fever
Bush tea	bush tii	A herbal remedy drunk hot

foot(fut) is the whole limb, so somebody who has hurt their foot may have hurt their thigh, and han(han) works the same way for the arm. Both are ordinary and neither is vague; the language simply divides the body at different joints than English does.

Two spelling notes fall out of this table. The th of mouth and teeth is a t, and the th of brother is a d — that is a regular sound correspondence, not a random one, and it runs through the whole lexicon. And the vowel in teeth is long where the vowel in sick is short. Length changes meaning in Patois, which is why the pronunciation column doubles a letter rather than trusting you to guess.

Food and drink

Food vocabulary is the easiest group on this page to enjoy learning, because every word has an object attached to it.

Food and drink

Patois	Written (Cassidy)	English
Nyam	nyam	To eat
Bickle	bikl	Food, provisions
Food	fuud	Food
Ackee	aki	The national fruit, cooked savoury
Callaloo	kalaluu	A leafy green, steamed
Bammy	bami	A flatbread made from cassava
Dumplin	domplin	A boiled or fried dumpling
Saltfish	saalfish	Salted cod
Yam	yam	Yam
Plantin	plantin	Plantain
Pepper	pepa	Pepper, usually the hot kind
Bulla	bula	A small dark round cake
Patty	pati	A filled pastry
Tea	tii	Any hot drink, whatever is in it
Wata	wata	Fresh drinking water
Sorrel	sorel	A red drink made from hibiscus

nyam(nyam)— to eat is the word most people meet first, and it is worth saying plainly that it is not a comic or a childish word. It is the ordinary verb, used by adults, and its relatives turn up right across West Africa and the Caribbean, which is about as strong as the evidence for a single word ever gets.

tea(tii) is the quiet trap. In Jamaica it names any hot drink — mint, chocolate, fever grass, whatever is in the pot — so an offer of tea is not an offer of what an English speaker is picturing. bickle(bikl)— food, which comes from victuals, an archaic English word for provisions, is the general term for what there is to eat, and it is the word an older speaker is more likely to reach for.

If you are going to be ordering any of this rather than reading about it, the sentences that carry it are in how to order food in Jamaica.

The house and the things in it

The domestic vocabulary is where the sound system becomes visible, because most of these words are English words with a Patois vowel in them and you can watch the substitution happen.

The house and everyday objects

Patois	Written (Cassidy)	English
Yaad	yaad	Home; a yard
Room	ruum	Room
Door	duor	Door
Winda	winda	Window
Kitchen	kichin	Kitchen
Roof	ruuf	Roof
Bed	bed	Bed
Chair	chier	Chair
Table	tiebl	Table
Pot	pat	Pot
Bottle	batl	Bottle
Cup	kop	Cup
Plate	pliet	Plate
Broom	bruum	Broom
Clothes	kluoz	Clothes
Shoes	shuuz	Shoes
Bag	bag	Bag
Fire	faiya	Fire

Read the second column of pot and bottle and you have the rule: the English vowel of hot, pot and shop comes out as the same open a across the board. It is the reason on is written pon(pan)— on, upon and pronounced to rhyme with the first syllable of pantry.

yaad(yaad)— home deserves its own line. It means a yard, and it means home, and among Jamaicans abroad it means Jamaica — which is where yardie comes from. A word that carries a place, a house and a country at once is doing more work than a translation column can show.

Money, work and what things cost

Several of these are false friends, and one of them is expensive.

Money and work

Patois	Written (Cassidy)	English
Money	moni	Money
Dolla	dala	A dollar
Change	chienj	Change; small money
Cheap	chiip	Cheap
Dear	dier	Expensive
Nuff	nof	Plenty, many
Buy	bai	To buy
Sell	sel	To sell
Shap	shap	A shop
Market	maakit	Market
Higgler	higla	A market trader
Wok	wok	Work
Job	jab	A job
Hussle	hosl	To make a living from whatever work comes
Bruk	brok	Broke; also broken

dear(dier)— expensive is the one that catches people out. British speakers recognise the price sense and file it as old-fashioned; American speakers have mostly never used it that way at all. In Patois it is simply the ordinary word for a high price, and it carries no affection whatever. nuff(nof)— plenty means plenty, and it is a quantity word rather than a judgement, so it modifies people as easily as things.

bruk(brok) covers both being out of money and being physically broken, which is a joke the language makes without meaning to. Anything to do with asking a price, counting or bargaining is set out in money, numbers and bargaining.

Places, transport and getting about

If you are travelling, this is the domain to learn before any other, because you will need it under time pressure with a driver who is already moving.

Places, transport and directions

Patois	Written (Cassidy)	English
Road	ruod	Road
Bus	bos	Bus
Taxi	taksi	Taxi
Town	toun	Town
Downtown	dountoun	The downtown part of a city
Country	konchri	The countryside, away from town
Gully	goli	A concrete drainage channel
Beach	biich	Beach
Corna	kaana	Corner
Cross	kraas	Across
Ova	uova	Over
Lef	lef	Left
Right	rait	Right
Walk	waak	To walk
Come	kom	To come
Go	guo	To go

Look at country. The English cluster tr is regularly said as chr in Patois, so the middle of that word starts the way church does, and the same shift is what makes the number three sound like the word for a plant. Its voiced twin turns dr into jr, which is why drink and dry take a j whenever their sound is spelled out.

Direction is far more often given by pointing plus a locative word — over there, right here — than by a street name, so a great deal of navigation happens with one finger and three syllables. The sentences for arriving, being driven and checking in are in Patois for the airport, the taxi and the hotel.

Weather, land and the shape of the day

Two groups that a phrase list usually skips, and that an ordinary conversation reaches within its first few minutes.

Weather and the natural world

Weather and the natural world

Patois	Written (Cassidy)	English
Rain	rien	Rain
Sun	son	Sun
Hot	hat	Hot
Cold	kuol	Cold
Breeze	briiz	Breeze; wind of any strength
Storm	staam	Storm
Sea	sii	Sea
Riva	riva	River
Bush	bush	Uncultivated land; the interior
Grung	grong	The ground
Mountain	mountin	Mountain
Moon	muun	Moon
Star	staar	Star
Dutty	doti	Dirty; also dirt itself
Wet	wet	Wet

bush(bush) is not scrubland in the dismissive English sense. It names the uncultivated interior, it is where the plants for a remedy come from, and bush medicine is a serious body of knowledge rather than a folk curiosity. breeze(briiz) covers wind at any strength, so a breeze can knock a sheet of zinc off a roof.

Time

Time words

Patois	Written (Cassidy)	English
Mawnin	maanin	Morning
Aftanoon	aftanuun	Afternoon
Evenin	iivnin	Evening
Night	nait	Night
Day	die	Day
Now	nou	Now
Soon	suun	Soon, on an unstated timescale
Jus now	jos nou	In a moment, loosely defined
Week	wiik	Week
Mont	mont	Month
Year	yier	Year
Time	taim	Time
Long time	lang taim	A long while
Fus	fos	First

The row for day is the one that unsettles people, because the pronunciation spelling is identical to an English word with a very different meaning. It is a coincidence of two writing systems and nothing more, and it is the clearest single argument for showing both columns rather than only the phonemic one.

soon(suun) and jus now(jos nou) are both softer than they look. Neither commits the speaker to a number of minutes, and reading them as precise is how a visitor ends up standing outside a shop feeling misled by a language that was being perfectly clear.

Feelings and character

Character vocabulary is where Patois is most obviously its own language rather than English with the sounds moved, because several of these words have no single-word English equivalent at all.

Feelings and character

Patois	Written (Cassidy)	English
Vex	veks	Angry, annoyed
Happy	hapi	Happy
Sad	sad	Sad
Fraid	fried	Afraid
Shame	shiem	Embarrassed
Boasy	buosi	Showy, pleased with one's appearance
Facety	fiesti	Impertinent, out of line
Renk	rengk	Offensive; also rank-smelling
Mawga	maaga	Thin
Tallawah	talawa	Small in size and strong with it
Bad mind	bad main	Ill will towards somebody else's success
Dread	jred	Serious, weighty, not to be taken lightly
Likkle	likl	Small

tallawah(talawa) is the one to know. It describes something small that is nevertheless strong, and it comes with a proverb attached that most Jamaicans can finish for you. bad mind(bad main) names the specific ill will that is aimed at somebody else's success, and English needs a clause to say it. facety(fiesti) is usually traced to feisty, and it has drifted a long way: it is a charge of rudeness, not a compliment about spirit. irie— good; at ease belongs in this group too, and it is deliberately not in the table. We have printed no pronunciation spelling for it, for the same reason as the three words held back from the table of false friends above: speakers differ over its vowels, and unlike almost everything else on this page its origin is genuinely unsettled.

fraid(fried) is a good demonstration of why the second column matters. Read the pronunciation spelling with English eyes and you get a cooking method. Read it as Cassidy, where ie is one vowel glide and not two letters, and you get a single syllable that rhymes with made.

Approval, disapproval and everything between

Approval and disapproval both have dedicated vocabulary here, and several items in this table are complete replies on their own rather than words you build a sentence out of.

Approval, disapproval and response words

Patois	Written (Cassidy)	English
Criss	kris	Sharp, new-looking, excellent
Bless	bles	A blessing, given as a greeting or a parting
Respec	rispek	Respect
Big up	big op	To praise somebody publicly
Seen	siin	Understood; agreed
Gwaan	gwaan	Go on; carry on
Galang	galang	Go along; get going
Ease up	iiz op	Lay off; give somebody a break
Cho	cho	An exclamation of exasperation
Kiss teet	kis tiit	The sucked-teeth sound of disapproval
Wutliss	wotlis	Useless, good for nothing

seen(siin) is the most useful word in this table for a learner. It is a complete reply: it says you have followed what was said and you agree with it, and it costs one syllable. It reached general speech the same way bredrin(bredrin) did, through Rastafarian usage, as did bless(bles) in the second row. respec(rispek) shows the final cluster reduction that runs through the language — the t on the end of the English word is simply not said, and both spellings record what is said rather than what English writes.

The tenth row is not a word at all. The sucked-teeth sound is a genuine item of vocabulary with a full range of meanings, from mild irritation to open contempt, and it is graded by length and force. It is also the fastest way for a visitor to give offence by accident. What big up yuhself actually means takes one of these words apart in detail.

The small words that carry the grammar

If you learn nothing else from this page, learn these. They are the load-bearing vocabulary, they are short, and there are not many of them.

Pronouns, articles and pointing words

Patois	Written (Cassidy)	English
Mi	mi	I, me
Yuh	yu	You, one person
Im	im	He, she, him, her
Unno	unu	You, more than one person
Wi	wi	We, us
Dem	dem	They, them; also the plural marker
Di	di	The
Dis	dis	This
Dat	dat	That
Deh	de	There; also to be somewhere
Weh	we	Where; also which or that
Wah	wa	What
Inna	ina	In, inside
Pon	pan	On, upon

Three things in that table are structurally different from English and worth naming. im(im) does not distinguish gender, so one word covers he, she, him and her and the context does the rest. unno(unu) is a plural you, a slot English lost and has been improvising around ever since with you lot and y'all. And dem(dem) is both a pronoun and the marker of plurality, placed after the noun instead of an ending — the subject of plurals and how -dem works.

The markers that carry tense, mood and negation

Patois	Written (Cassidy)	English
A	a	Is; at; and the marker of an action in progress
Did	did	Marks an action already completed
Wi	wi	Marks the future
Fi	fi	To; for; belonging to
Nuh	no	Not; do not
Neva	neva	Did not
Kyan	kyan	Can
Cyaahn	kyaahn	Cannot
Haffi	afi	Have to
Mus	mos	Must

Those ten words carry tense, mood and negation between them. The third row is not a misprint: the future marker and the pronoun we are the same short word, and position tells them apart. Patois does not change the shape of a verb to move it through time; it puts a small separate word in front of it and leaves the verb alone, which is why the verbs are easier than an English speaker expects and the word order is harder. Patois verb tenses walks through the order they combine in.

The rows for can and cannot are a pair worth handling carefully. The positive and the negative differ by a long vowel and a nasal, and dropping either one gives you the opposite of what you meant, so this is a pair to learn by ear rather than by eye. How negation works covers the rest of the system, and the Patois copula explains why the first row can mean is and at and neither, depending on what follows it.

The words that came from West Africa

Most of the vocabulary on this page came from English. A smaller, identifiable layer came from West and Central African languages — Akan first among them, chiefly in its Twi varieties, with Igbo, Kongo and Yoruba behind — and it is the layer people most want to know about.

Words with African origins

Patois	Written (Cassidy)	English
Duppy	dopi	A returning spirit
Nana	nana	An elder; a title of respect
Anansi	anansi	The spider of the story cycle
Jook	juk	To poke or jab

nyam(nyam)— to eat and unno(unu)— you, more than one belong here too, and both have already appeared above, which is the point: the African layer is not a set of exotic entries kept apart from the working vocabulary. It is the working vocabulary. A pronoun and the verb for eating are as ordinary as words get.

Be sceptical of long lists of African etymologies, including ones you find elsewhere on the internet. pickney(pikni)— child looks African and is not — it came through Portuguese, along the same Atlantic routes. Even inside that short table the ground is uneven: the fourth row has been traced to Fula and to Wolof and also argued to be an English regional survival, and which African language gave us the first row is still argued over. And the deepest African inheritance is not lexical at all: it is in the sound system, in the serial verbs, in the way plurality and tense are marked. We set the evidence out, with the caveats, in Patois words from Twi, Yoruba and Igbo.

How a word changes with the room it is in

A vocabulary list has one column for meaning, and meaning does not work that way. The same word moves depending on who is speaking, to whom, and where.

Jamaican speech runs along a range. At one end sits deep creole, furthest from English in both grammar and vocabulary; at the other, something very close to standard English with Jamaican rhythm and a handful of Patois words in it. Every speaker moves along that range constantly, within a conversation and often within a sentence, according to the setting. Moving is a skill, not a slip, and no point on the range is the correct one — that is the subject of the Patois continuum.

For a learner, three practical consequences. First, a word can be entirely ordinary in one setting and pointed in another; the character words in particular carry an edge with a stranger that they do not carry with a friend. Second, the same idea will be said with different vocabulary depending on the setting, so hearing an English-looking word does not mean the speaker has switched languages. Third, your relatives may use a word you were taught differently, or not use it at all, and that is regional and generational variation rather than anybody being mistaken.

Music makes this visible faster than anything else. Reggae carried a set of Patois words into general English usage in the nineteen-seventies, and dancehall has been generating and retiring vocabulary at speed ever since — enough that a word from a hit ten years old can date you. We follow both threads in the Patois in reggae and in dancehall lyrics translated.

Is Patois slang, or is it a language?

A great many people search for these words as Jamaican slang, and it is worth answering the question rather than pretending nobody asks it.

Patois has informal vocabulary, exactly as English does. Some words on this page are casual, some are current among younger speakers and unknown to older ones, and some will be out of fashion within a decade. That is an ordinary property of a living language and it describes a register inside Patois, not Patois itself.

What Patois is, as a whole, is a language: an English-lexifier creole with its own grammar, its own sound system and its own vocabulary. Tense is marked by separate words in a fixed order. Plurality is marked after the noun. Negation, questions and emphasis are each built in a way English does not build them. A system with its own rules that a speaker can be fluent or clumsy in is not a loose collection of informal words, and it is not damaged English — the case is set out in full in is Patois a language or a dialect.

The distinction matters for a practical reason as well as a principled one. If you approach this vocabulary as an informal decoration on English, you will learn the words and keep the English grammar underneath, and you will be understood in the way a tourist is understood. If you approach it as a language, the grammar comes with the vocabulary and the words start behaving.

Where to go from here

Vocabulary alone will get you comprehension and not production. The realistic next step depends on what you came for.

If you want to say things rather than recognise them, the sentences that carry these words are on Jamaican Patois phrases, and the structures that hold them together are on how to speak Jamaican Patois. If what you actually want is to understand what is different about the two languages, rather than to speak either of them, Jamaican Patois and English compared is the more direct route. If you are starting a conversation from nothing, how to say hello is the shortest way in, and if you are teaching a child, Patois for children starts somewhere different again. The proverbs are their own reward, and thirty of them, explained is where the vocabulary on this page turns into something people actually say to each other.

And listen more than you read. Every spelling on this page, in both columns, is a description of a sound somebody makes. The written forms are here so you have something to hold on to between conversations, not so you can learn the language from paper.