# High Five *The uplifted-hand greeting that moved from Black social life into the world’s shared gesture vocabulary.* > Black's Encyclopedia — the sourced record of Black American life. > Portal: The Culture · Status: In review · Revised: July 23, 2026 · Revisions: 1 > Canonical: https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/high-five-b6df ## Questions this record answers - Who invented the high five? - Did the high five come from Black athletes? - What is the Black origin of the high five? - How did the high five become popular culture? ## Summary The high five emerged from Black athletic and social life before it became a worldwide gesture. Its public spread is a record of Black style traveling outward and becoming ordinary speech of the body. ## The archive's standing The high five belongs in the archive as a piece of everyday culture whose origin was long treated as casual or ownerless. It is a small form with a large history: a gesture of recognition, delight, and shared timing that became standard precisely because Black life made it legible and repeatable. The archive holds it as authorship, not trivia. ## The gesture The high five is a hand-to-hand greeting and celebration gesture that became widely popular in the late twentieth century. Its meaning is immediate: acknowledgement, success, mutual regard. The best-documented early public narratives place its rise in Black sport and Black social culture, where improvisation and ritual often enter the mainstream first as living practice and only later as named custom. ## Why it matters Popular culture often treats gestures as if they simply appear. The archive rejects that erasure. A gesture is made somewhere, by somebody, in a social world with its own codes, and Black America has repeatedly furnished the creative grammar later adopted by everyone else. ## The broader pattern The high five is part of a larger record in which Black expressive forms move into national life stripped of origin. The archive records the form, the makers, and the route of diffusion without diluting authorship into anonymity. ## What the record shows The high five is not merely a frivolous sign of celebration. It is a durable invention of social style whose Black roots are essential to its history and to the way people still use it today. ## Sources 1. Randy Krehbiel, *Tulsa World* reporting on the high-five origin story and its Black athletic circulation, 2000s. 2. Charles Panati, *Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things*, Harper & Row, 1987. ## Related records - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/clapback - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/moonwalk-dance-move - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/electric-slide - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/soul-train - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/black-fraternity-step-show --- Cite as: Black's Encyclopedia, "High Five," revised July 23, 2026. https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/high-five-b6df Text under the Black's Record License: cite the record, keep attribution attached, cite the revision date.