Colored People's Time
Colored People's Time noun: a notional system of time (or time zone) which others sometimes derogatorily ascribe to African Americans, and which they sometimes jocularly ascribe to themselves, to account for their supposed tendency to be tardy.
Noun
Colored People's Time (uncountable)
- A notional system of time (or time zone) which others sometimes derogatorily ascribe to African Americans, and which they sometimes jocularly ascribe to themselves, to account for their supposed tendency to be tardy.
- “Colored People's Time,” King said with a grin. “It always takes us longer to get where we're going.”1967 January 27, Martin Luther King, Jr., quoted in Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound (1994), p. 338
- Synonyms:
- CP Time, CPT, Colored People Time
Synonyms of Colored People's Time
Origin of Colored People's Time
From its facetious treatment as a time zone.
Questions about Colored People's Time
- What does Colored People's Time mean?
- Colored People's Time means a notional system of time (or time zone) which others sometimes derogatorily ascribe to African Americans, and which they sometimes jocularly ascribe to themselves, to account for their supposed tendency to be tardy.
- What part of speech is Colored People's Time?
- Colored People's Time is a noun.
Words near Colored People's Time in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: Colored People's Time (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-Colored People's Time.ogg.
Cite this entry: “Colored People's Time.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/colored_people%27s_time. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.