When did people in Boston start saying ‘wicked’?

In 1934, a source told a Boston Globe reporter that he got a “wicked good price” for plots of land. Another Globe writer complained in 1936 about “a wicked cold morning!”

These are some of the first uses of “wicked” in the Globe that don’t have a religious undertone or don’t describe, most likely, a woman or the world. A 1927 advertisement for Listerine placed in the paper also claims to treat a “wicked cold.”

Now, “wicked” is everywhere you look in Greater Boston, with the term associated nationally with the region. The suburbs are dotted with Wicked Local news sites, former Celtic Marcus Smart played on the regionalism for his own cereal brand, and Matt Damon was famously “wicked smart” in “Good Will Hunting.” Plus, an untold number of advertisements directed to Bostonians lazily use “wicked” in attempts to localize their messaging.

But how did it become so synonymous with Boston?

When did ‘wicked’ become an adverb?

One thing every Bostonian knows is that “wicked” should be used as an adverb, not just as an adjective. (In 2020, Hyundai didn’t get the message for their Super Bowl ad.)

But, it’s unclear where exactly the Boston “wicked” — meaning when it’s used as an intensifier, to put it in linguistic lingo — got its start as the region’s most famous vernacular.

There are multiple myths around the history of “wicked” in New England, including nebulous ties to the Salem witch trials and infamous former Boston Mayor James Curley. However, most sources are torn about its origins.

“Wicked,” before New Englanders’ meaning “of exceptional quality or degree,” comes from “wicce” or “wicca,” which comes from sorcerers and the practice of witchcraft. With Boston’s neighbor Salem and its infamous witch trials, some sources attribute the term to the widely publicized atrocities of the 1690s.

Danny Erker, an associate professor of linguistics at Boston University, said in an email to Boston.com that the first use of “wicked,” used the way a modern-day Bostonian would, was actually in the 17th century — but by an Englishman. 

“Yesterday was a hot day, a wicked hot day,” Thomas Porter writes in his 1663 play. Porter made linguistic history here as one of the first to use “wicked” as an intensifier.

Wicked Curley to “wicked cool”? Probably not.

Some sources say “wicked” didn’t come into widespread use as an intensifier until hundreds of years later, in the 1900s. 

Before Dunkin’s “Wicked Lahhhge” tumbler, F. Scott Fitzgerald is sometimes credited with using it in that way for the first time in print. In his 1920 debut novel “This Side of Paradise,” which mostly takes place at Princeton University and in New York City, a character takes a girl to go “shake a wicked calf.”

Another theorized origin for Boston’s spin on the word links it to Curley, who served four terms as mayor and notoriously spent time in prison during one of them. He might have inspired its use a few decades after Fitzgerald, Boston magazine reported in 2017. 

In 1942, Curley was running for the U.S. House of Representatives, but his affair with Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch of the West in “The Wizard of Oz,” stalled his campaign. He broke it off, and Cardinal William Henry O’Connell of the Boston archdiocese rejoiced: “Our wicked man has become wicked good!” The slang could’ve taken off from here, but it’s most likely a myth, according to the magazine article.

Adam Cooper, a teaching professor in Northeastern University’s linguistics program, said these theories are most likely explanations found “after the fact.”

“It’s just not unusual for people — just because language is such an ingrained part of our everyday lives, I think we can naturally make conclusions, draw hypotheses about how our language use develops that don’t actually bear on the actual history,” he said.

From the 1960s onward, the word started to show up more frequently in the Globe. A reporter referred to a “wicked hot sauce” in 1960, a 1966 ad called a diet 7-Up drink “wicked cool,” and a reader wrote to a columnist to ask how to deal with their “wicked hard” water in 1972.

‘Wicked’ likely has more tame background

Most likely, “wicked” has less interesting origins. Merriam-Webster posits that in New England, it might’ve come as a natural extension from “awful” or “terrible.” 

“Something that was wicked fast, for example, might have been to such a degree that seemed the result of a curse or supernatural force,” according to the dictionary.

Erker said “wicked” lost its negative connotation from the 1600s and has since become “one of the most salient features of English in the region.”

National advertisements might blasphemously overuse the term, but “wicked” has remained as classic Boston as “pahk yah cah in Hahvahd Yahd” since the 1960s.

Other slang words from surfers and skaters like “rad,” “sick,” or even “hella” have transcended American regions, while “wicked” has stayed heartily local. Cooper said while regional slangs can permeate into American language, “wicked” didn’t — or hasn’t yet. He said it’s not clear why or how it became a very Boston thing.

“Those who want to assert their identity, assert their membership as part of this community, they would … use the language they perceive to be associated with that group, so you get this feedback loop,” Cooper said. “Over time you get to a situation where we are today, where we have this sense, playful or otherwise, that wicked is Boston or New England English.”