A disc jockey plays records, but a professional horse-racer is also a jockey. Why does a person who works with music records share the same professional title as a person who works with horses? What’s the connection? Let’s start by looking at the origins of the word jockey.
Going right back to the start of the 16th century, Jock was a by-name of the name John; that is, a name often used as a generic term for common people. The diminutive form, then, was Jockey (or Johnny). In a poem estimated to have been written in 1507, (hence the obscurity of the language), William Dunbar writes: “To Iok Fule my foly fre Lego post corpus sepultum”. Here, you can see the early spelling of Jock as Iok.
The diminutive form jockey can be found in Shakespeare’s Richard III (1597) also with its early spelling: “Iockey of Norfolke be not so bould, For Dickon thy master is bought and sould”. Its modern spelling was well established by 1846 when Charles Dickens published his novel Dombey and Son and wrote: “You’re Dombey’s jockey, a’nt you?’ said the first man. ‘I’m in Dombey’s House, Mr. Clark,’ returned the boy”.
Almost two centuries after its first appearance in English print, jockey was used as a reference to professional horse-racers when John Evelyn wrote in his diary: “We returnd over New-market-heath,..the Jockies breathing their fine barbs & racers, & giving them their heates” (The diary of John Evelyn, a1684). But by this time jockey came with many variations in meaning: it could also be used to describe a beggar, a fraudster, a horse-back courier, or a horse-dealer (all mid to late 17th century).
Disc jockey – music
How did a horse-racer get linguistically lumped together with vagabonds and cheats? Perhaps the jockey in horse jockey derives from jock as the generic name for the common lad (and perhaps the boys who worked at the stables with the horses), and doesn’t suggest anything derogatory about professional horse-racers. Nevertheless, we are still no closer to finding the link between a horse-jockey and a disc jockey.
Disc jockey first appeared in English print in a 1941 article from America’s Variety magazine: “Disc jockey solves vacation. Turning a program over to the public while the emcee is vacationing is big stuff from a listener’s angle, WEBR is finding” (23 July 34/4).
So by this point, jockey was being used in the world of radio, but it was also used to refer to drivers of motor vehicles or garage attendants (“garage jockeys”). A 1912 article in Collier’s magazine explains: “Some are, so to speak, ‘gentlemen jockeys’, and own, enter, and drive their own cars for the fun of the thing” (28 Sept. 11/2). In 1942, according to the American Thesaurus of Slang, (L. V. Berrey & M. Van den Bark) a motorcycle racer was also known as a “broadsider, jockey,..motor jockey”.
Perhaps it’s somewhere around here, then, from early 20th century American motoring culture, that the the word jockey moves away from the horse-racing and motor industry towards the world of radio and music. In the same American Thesaurus of Slang is an entry for truck driver: “truck jockey or spinner… Spec. juice jockey, a gasoline-truck driver”. The word “spinner” here is interesting because people often talk about disc jockeys (or DJs) spinning records.
As the American motor-jockey, or “spinner”, listened to his radio, the meaning of jockey transferred from the person at the car wheel (and the lad steering his horse) to the person who sat at the controls in the radio station spinning records.
