Learn English – Where does “get-go” come from

etymologyidiomsslang

Where does the compound word "get-go", as in the phrase "right from the get-go" come from? None of the dictionary definitions I've seen try to explain it, and the Etymology Dictionary doesn't even have a reference to it.

The only thing I can think of is that it's short for "GETting GOing", but that doesn't explain its use as a noun.

Best Answer

It appears to be an expression from American Black English whose earliest usage is from the middle '60s. It was widely used especially from the '80s in sport papers:

  • "From the git-go," (or "get-go," as it's slightly more commonly spelled), meaning "from the very beginning," appears to have originated in the vernacular of American Black English.

  • The earliest record of the phrase is from 1966, when it appeared in a story by Toni Cade Bambera, a writer, civil rights activist, and teacher, whose fiction is set in both the rural South and the urban North. How long the phrase may have been used in speech before 1966 is impossible to say. A much less common variant is "from the get," which was first recorded in 1971.

  • "From the get-go" is interchangeable with, and perhaps derived from, the older phrase "from the word go." Only in the past 10 years or so has "get-go" caught on widely with the general population. Its popularity presumably owes much to its catchy, alliterative quality. By the late 1980s "from the get-go" was popular in sports journalism; in the '90s it has come to be widely used and can be found in the edited prose of some of our most respected periodicals, although it retains an informal, conversational quality.

(desertnews.com)

The American Black English origin is confirmed also by the American English Idioms in the News which cites as an early usage the 1967 biography by Harlem writer Piri Thomas, "Down These Mean Streets".

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