cheeze

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Bread, dough, clams, bacon, cheese. English loves a slang term for money—and many of them are food-related, perhaps due to physical resemblances or riffs on the notion of breadwinner.

Cheese as a slang term for money dates back to the mid-1800s. The slang term spread in the 1990s, thanks in part to its use in prominent hip-hop lyrics, such as in the chorus of Jay-Z’s 1999 song “Big Pimpin'”: “We be big pimpin’, spendin’ cheese.”

Cheese has long been misspelled, whether by accident or on purpose, as cheeze. (We found a humorous instance in a 1921 dairy journal.) As slang for money, cheeze can be found in 1990s hip-hop lyrics. Both hip-hop and internet slang like to use deliberate misspellings.

Cheeze is also often use to refer to vegan cheese, or a cheese-like substance made without dairy. Vegan food substitutes often use alternative spellings to help consumers differentiate products from their meat- or dairy-based originals.