The Big Apple

"Big Apple" is a nickname for New York City. It was first popularized in the 1920s by John J. Fitz Gerald, a sports writer for the New York Morning Telegraph. Its popularity since the 1970s is due in part to a promotional campaign by the New York tourist authorities.

Although the history of Big Apple was once thought a mystery, a clearer picture of the term's history has emerged due to the work of amateur etymologist Barry Popik and Gerald Cohen of Missouri University of Science and Technology. A number of false theories had previously existed, including a claim that the term derived from a woman named Eve who ran a brothel in the city. This was subsequently exposed as a hoax.

The earliest known usage of 'big apple' appears in the book The Wayfarer in New York (1909), in which author Edward S. Martin writes:

Kansas is apt to see in New York a greedy city.... It inclines to think that the big apple gets a disproportionate share of the national sap.

William Safire considered this the coinage, but the Random House Dictionary of American Slang has described the usage as "metaphorical or perhaps proverbial, rather than a concrete example of the later slang term".

The Big Apple was popularized as a name for New York City by John J. Fitz Gerald in a number of horse-racing articles for the New York Morning Telegraph in the 1920s. The earliest of these was a casual reference on 3rd May, 1921:

J. P. Smith, with Tippity Witchet and others of the L. T. Bauer string, is scheduled to start for "the big apple" to-morrow after a most prosperous Spring campaign at Bowie and Havre de Grace.

Fitz Gerald referred to the "big apple" frequently thereafter. He explained his use in a column dated 18th February, 1924, under the headline "Around the Big Apple":

The Big Apple. The dream of every lad that ever threw a leg over a thoroughbred and the goal of all horsemen. There's only one Big Apple. That's New York.

Fitz Gerald's reference to "dusky" stable hands suggests the term's origin may lie in African-American culture. Evidence for this may be found in the Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper that had a national circulation. Writing for the Defender on 16th September 1922, “Ragtime” Billy Tucker used the name "big apple" to refer to New York in a non-horse-racing context:

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