yout

The Bomber Jacket

Yout originates in Jamaican Creole, where youth is pronounced like yoot and refers to young people. Yute dem, for instance, means “children” or “youth” more generally.

By the 1990s–2000s, yout became a slang equivalent for “dude” or “man” among West Indian migrants in London, New York City, and Toronto. Hip-hop artists and reggae artists appear to have popularized the term.

me.me

In 1989, Bad Brains, a pioneering hardcore punk-reggae rock group, came out with “Yout’ Juice,” featuring the lines: “Ponce de Leon never found the fountain of youth / Blessed in Zion, yout’ juice.” In 2013, popular Brooklyn-born but Caribbean-descended Joey Badass released “My Yout,” about coming of age. And in 2017, superstar Drake, a proud Torontonian, reflected on himself as “an angry yout” on his Billboard Top-100 track “Do Not Disturb.”

Drake’s hometown NBA team, the Toronto Raptors, tried out the term in a tweet featuring a young boy up against one of its players.

A+ closeout by the yout pic.twitter.com/slTN70qHDo

— Toronto Raptors (@Raptors) February 4, 2018

Elsewhere in the Jamaican communities of Toronto (and among those who’ve co-opted their slang), waste yute is slang for a “worthless person.”

In the Caribbean and the UK, yout’man is another term for a “young person,” man or woman, since the early 1990s. In Caribbean English in the UK in the late 1990s and early 2000s, yout came to mean an immature or rebellious young person, sometimes used judgmentally and other times affectionately.

These youts have no relation to a gnome-like creature recorded in Finnish and Swedish folklore since the 17th century. Nor Yout.com, a website that lets users download content from YouTube founded by John Nader in 2016.