The term a hot minute can be found all over blogs and in casual speech, meaning essentially, "a long time."
I can't find it defined in reputable dictionaries, but The New York Times confirms the meaning in this article about slang uses of the word "hot."
Hottie is still bandied about on campus by not-quite-with-it seniors, and a hot minute is defined as “a long time.” There is life left in the cleaned-up meaning of hot mess, which has come to mean “disheveled” or “incompetent,” as in “I was a hot mess this morning before I hit the shower.”
The term reminds me of "A New York Minute," which means the exact opposite, "a very short time."
So what is the origin of the term "a hot minute," and how long has it been around? How exactly did it come to mean "a long time?"
Best Answer
Seldom does historical research sort out the uses of an idiomatic phrase so neatly as it did 'hot minute' and its earlier variant 'red-hot minute'. The early uses had three principal senses:
An 1847 quote, the earliest use I found, attests sense 1:
So also this from 1850 attests the other facet of sense 1:
The literal sense, 2, is represented by this brief excerpt from an 1852 account of an Indian wedding:
For sense 3, the following anecdote from an 1859 Tennessee newspaper provides an origin story not only for 'hot minute', but also for 'strike while the iron's hot':
The context of this latter attestation makes plain it is, or is represented as, a remembrance of the author of the piece.
These three senses are repeated in the later uses; I easily collected 27 from the years between 1859 and 1923 before abandoning the pursuit. The majority of uses are in sense 3, with only a sprinkling of uses in senses 1 and 2. Also, for sense 3, the phrase occurred as both 'red-hot minute' and 'hot minute'.
Fast-forwarding to present day uses, I worked my way backward using an assortment of tools (an internet search engine, popular news databases, other corpora), and looking for the origin of the other sense:
This search at first seemed unproductive; most uses even in the present day represent sense 3 or a meaning very similar to that of sense 3. Sprinklings of uses of the phrase in senses 1 and 2 persist, of course. However, I did begin to see a pattern in the infrequent uses where the sense either was, or might be (context did not always distinguish), sense 4.
Simply, after the phrase began to be negated, perhaps sometime in the 1990s due to cultural influence from the popularity of The Red Hot Chili Pepper's hit song "One Hot Minute", semantic drift worked to produce uses of 'hot minute' in sense 4, "a long time", even when the phrase was not negated.
The following quote from a 2010 newspaper article clearly illustrates how negation of 'hot minute' produces the meaning, "a long time":
In the phrase "it wasn't a hot minute", "long" or "a long time" can be substituted for "a hot minute" without altering the sense of the phrase. Similarly, if the phrase used had instead been "it was a hot minute", then "a short time" or "soon" could be substituted for "a hot minute" without altering the meaning. So, the quote demonstrates the semantic equivalence of "it was a hot minute" and the negated "it wasn't a hot minute".
That 2010 use, and the eleven other uses of 'hot minute' I collected from 2000-2016, strongly suggest that, originally, explicit negation of 'hot minute' produced the opposite meaning. Not all the uses in sense 4 that I collected are explicitly negated but, notably, the earlier uses are either explicitly negated or negated implicitly by a reference to 'a time since [something]'.
Here are the uses, with some brief analysis. Parenthetical comments are mine:
Of the twelve uses with meaning approximating 'a long time' that I collected from 2000-2016, seven are explicitly negated. Of the remaining five, two are from 2016 and the meaning of 'hot minute' is somewhat indeterminate, one is from 2015, one is from 2012, and one is possibly from 2009. Discounting the 2009 quote edited in 2012, all but one of the 7 uses I found with the meaning of "a long time" from the first dozen years in the 2000s are explicitly negated. The meaning of the negated 'hot minute' used in the prevailing sense 3, "a brief window of opportunity", is the obvious "a long time".
These observations suggest that 'hot minute' began to acquire the sense of 'a long time' in the decade before the 2000s, and then in the context of the negation of its meaning of 'a window of opportunity, usually but not necessarily short'.