dolo

Put simply, dolo is “solo,” e.g., I’m rolling dolo into the club, or going alone as opposed to with friends. Dolo can also mean “secretly” or, to use another slang expression, on the down low. Dolo often appears in the phrase solo-dolo, which can mean doing something alone but, apparently, being chilled about it.

Dolo originates from Black slang in the 1990s. Its origin is obscure, but it’s hard to resist a connection to 1) the first two letters in the words down low and 2) the rhyming reduplication for solo (cf. super-duper). One early instance comes from an internet Usenet post in which a user said he’d have to go to a new movie solo-dolo because his friends had already seen it. Rolling dolo popped up in a 2003 issue of Vibe magazine, and by 2004, it made its Urban Dictionary debut.

In 2009, the term inspired a clothing line, Dolo, which defined the term as “solo” and saw in it “the strength to be an individual.” Also that year, artist Kid Cudi released the track “Solo Dolo ‘Nightmare,'” helping to popularize the term. The song, a meditation on feeling like one is all alone, features the hook: “When I’m closing my eyes / I’m Mr. Solo Dolo.”