Skip to main content

And Why Do We Call Them That?

March 2023
2min read

Every American knows that the word jalopy means an elderly, decrepit automobile. Though the word undoubtedly originated in the United States, it is now common in all English-speaking countries and occasionally is used in some other parts of the world.

The earliest known appearance of the word jalopy in print, in a book published in Chicago in 1929, spelled it jaloppi . Nowadays, though dictionaries show different acceptable spellings, the most common is jalopy , even though this is somewhat undesirable in that it makes it appear that the word might rhyme with “soapy” or “dopey.” Instead, of course, jalopy rhymes with “copy” or “poppy.”

All current dictionaries of the English language, including slang dictionaries, define the word jalopy as “an old, decrepit automobile,” and follow that with “origin unknown.” The dictionary compilers simply do not know how the word came into existence, though they ail agree that it originated in the United States in the 1920s. It never applied to horse-drawn vehicles but only to automobiles and, rarely, to small airplanes.

The 1929 book that contains the earliest appearance of the word— It’s a Racket , by G. L. Hostetter and T. Q. Beesley—defines it as “a cheap make of automobile; an automobile fit only for junking,” but says nothing about its origin. In the 1930s the word appeared occasionally in American literature, for example in John Steinbeck’s 1936 novel In Dubois Battle , but in no case was its origin sugested. On page 306 of Volume XI (1936) of the scholarly journal American Speech , the word is the subject of a brief explanatory note by W.L. Werner of Pennsylvania State College, who spells il jalopy and defines it as “an old battered automobile” but indicates only that the word was apparently first used in the Northeast.

Everyone knows what a jalopy is, but until this moment no account of where the word comes from has appeared in print.

The one book that gives some hint as to its origin is the 1963 edition of H.L. Mencken’s The American Language , which defines jalopy as “a decreipt automobile or airplane.” This is followed by “origin obscure” but there is a footnote stating the Professor Lomas Barrett of Washington and Lee University in Virginia, a specialist in Latin American Spanish, informed the editors that jalopy comes from a Latin American word—which he did not supply.

Professor Barrett died in 1972, and no one seems to know what he had in mind. But there is a very plausible story as to the birth of the word jalopy that does indeed have a Latin American background—specifically, Mexican.

In the 1920s automobiles were being manufactured in rapidly increasing numbers in the United States. During that decade more and more of them, especially secondhand ones, were exported to Canada and Mexico, where automobile production did not yet exist. To get to Canada, many of the cars were simply driven north across the border, but to get to Mexico the great majority were loaded onto ships in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia and transported to Veracruz, Mexico’s major east-coast port.

The capital of Veracruz state is the city of Jalapa, seventy miles inland from the port of Veracruz on the road to Mexico City. Jalapa is renowned as the source of the red-hot chili jalapeño . Most of the secondhand automobiles that were unloaded at Veracruz were conveyed inland to Jalapa and there rehabilitated and put on the Mexican market. As the 1920s went on, so many shipping papers prepared in U.S. ports for secondhand cars showed Jalapa as the final destination that shipping clerks and longshoremen began nicknaming the old cars jalapas , pronouncing the j Yankee-style instead of as h , the proper Mexican way. The word for elderly automobiles evolved rather rapidly from jalapas to jaloppies , then to jalopies .

No one knows exactly who originated the word jalopy , or when. Thomas W. Gleason, president of the International Longshoremen’s Association, was born
in 1900 and has been active on the New York docks since 1917; he recalls the Jalapa-jalopy story, but cannot declare with certainty that members of his association coined the word jalopy . They may well have, but as the 1920s fade farther into the past, this will probably be impossible to prove. Melitta Härtung, research editor of the American Automobile Association, and Alberto Gomez Obregon, director general of the Asociación Mexicana Automovilistica, are aware of the story too, although they know of no record of it in print.

But the story is very belivable: it accords with what all known facts, and it checks with what Professors Werner and Barret wrote. we can be reasonably sure, therefore, that, just as the name of the Italian city Bologna became the source of the American slang word baloney , so the Mexican city of Jalapa gave its name to the American slang word jalopy .

—Richard H. Hopper

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "April/May 1986"

Authored by: David McCullough

A noted historian’s very personal tour of the city where so much of the American past took shape—with excursions into institutions famous and obscure, the archives that are the nation’s memory, and the haunts of some noble ghosts

Authored by: Natalie A. Brooks

In a classic medical paper, Dr. Reginald Fitz identified the disease, named it, showed how to diagnose it, and prescribed an operation that would save tens of millions of lives

Authored by: Michael F. Wendland

When copper-country miners went on strike, the owners brought thugs from the slums of New York to northern Michigan. The struggle led to an event that killed a city.

Authored by: Dick Adler

Lorenzo Da Ponte, New York bookseller and Pennsylvania grocer, was a charming ne’er-do-well in the eyes of his fellow Americans. He happened, also, to have written the words for Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro .

Authored by: The Editors

On sojourns away from the studio where he labored in oils, Homer took along his watercolors and produced his freshest and most expressive work

Authored by: Gregg Merken

For forty years George Kennan and Paul Nitze, architects of our foreign policy under nine Presidents, have squared off over Russia, the atom bomb, arms control—everything except their respect and affection for each other

Authored by: Neil A. Grauer

Robert Benchley, a woebegone chronicler of his own inadequacies, was the humorist’s humorist, a man beloved by practically everyone but himself

Authored by: Lawrence B. Custer

Up until the last century in some parts of the country, a murderer’s guilt could legally be determined by what happened when he or she touched the victim’s corpse

Featured Articles

Rarely has the full story been told about how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

The world’s most prominent actress risked her career by standing up to one of Hollywood’s mega-studios, proving that behind the beauty was also a very savvy businesswoman. 

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.