Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: Calling dibs!

 How many of you remember calling dibs in your youth? In our family of four kids and two adults, "I call dibs!" was a common refrain when it came to, oh, who got the first bowl of popcorn on Friday night (anyone else remember Jiffy Pop?) or who opened the first present on Christmas day. (In our family, we took turns opening presents vs the "everyone simultaneously rip and tear" process employed by others.)

So what are dibs? Where did the word come from, and how long has calling dibs been around?

I call dibs on finding out!

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According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, dibs, in the sense of taking a claim, has only been around for a century plus a bit:

dibs: children's word to express a claim on something, 1915, originally U.S., apparently from earlier senses "a portion or share" and "money" (early 19c. colloquial), probably a contraction of dibstone "a knuckle-bone or jack in a children's game" (1690s), in which the first element is of unknown origin. The game consisted of tossing up small pebbles or the knuckle-bones of a sheep and catching them alternately with the palm and the back of the hand.

Knuckle-bones of a sheep? Ick! But probably folks in 1690s viewed such things differently. Merriam-Webster also has a post on the history of dibs. This post notes that dibs is an obsolete verb, which means (or meant) "to dab" or "to pat." M-W also traces the word to the game of dibstones, but the route from that to the current definition of "to claim something" is unclear:

...It's likely that the game allowed a player to gain privileges over their opponents if the dibs went a certain way. Another theory is that dibs was influenced by dubs, a shortened form of double that is used in the game of marbles as an exclamation to declare one's right to two marbles knocked outside the ring of play. If dibs came to be used in a similar way, it is possible that its meaning broadened over time to convey the more general sense of "rights" or "claim" that it possesses today.

M-W also explores the 19th-century U.S. slang usage of dibs to mean "small amounts of money," hypothesizing:

The path from the "dibstones" dibs to this "money" sense is unmarked—but, undeniably, any game of chance does entice betting. It does seem plausible that the "money" sense influenced the word's application to a "portion" or "share," as recorded in an 1859 dictionary of American thieves' cant entitled Vocabulum, or, The rogue's lexicon and compiled by George W. Matsell.

I checked the Vocabulum, and although I found dibs listed and defined as "money," I didn't find any elucidation of the word's origin.

I finally turned to World Wide Words, which said (in part): 

I’ve read half a dozen explanations of where this one came from, and in every one there’s a howling great gap where we might expect historical continuity.

Oh well. If WWW shrugs, I guess I will too!

Dibs? Who knows?
Image by Robin Higgins from Pixabay