Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. to disparage, to attack verbally.

1905		Sun. Times (Perth) 10 Dec. 4/8: When a journalistic rival tries to ‘dis’ you / And to prejudice you in the public’s eyes.
1981		Cold Crush Bros ‘Fresh Wild Fly and Bold’ 🎵 Kiss his woman, dis his mother, and don’t even run.
1984		Run DMC ‘Rock Box’ 🎵 We’ll diss a sucker MC make the other suckers hate it.
1986		Eble Campus Sl. Nov. 3: dis – criticize.
1987		G. Tate ‘Michael Jackson’ in Flyboy in the Buttermilk (1992) 97: Young black men and women who conceive of their African inheritance as little more than a means to cold-crash mainstream America and then cold-dis [...] the brothers and sisters left behind.
1989		G. Tate ‘The GOP Throws a Mammy-Jammy’ in Flyboy in the Buttermilk (1992) 100: Need I spell out what effect Dukakis’s dissing of Jesse and the entire African-American body politic did to turn her stomach?
1991		Pinchers ‘Bandolero’ 🎵 You should never dis the champion.
1999		T. Hill Underground 7: Oy. Don’t diss my team, all right?
2000		Guardian Rev. 1 Jan. 18: Why you be always dissin’ the RAC?
2001		(con. 1990s) in J. Miller One of the Guys 111: ‘Don’t let nobody diss your set’.
2006		C.W. Ford Deuce’s Wild 27: T-Mo dissed al-Salaam for converting to Islam.
2011		Kon-shens ‘Bad Girl’ 🎵 Gyal weh nuh fraid if a gyal diss you or diss your friend.
2019		Guardian 23 Sept. 11/4: Mocking straights, ‘faggots’ and Lesbians, midgets, ‘fat girls’ [...] whichever minority she’s just dissed.
2020		G. Armstrong Young Team 72: ‘Try n diss me — A’m fuckin Bruce Lee!’.

2. to disrespect.

1987		Eble Campus Sl. Oct. 2: dis – not show proper respect.
1991		L. Bing Do or Die (1992) 3: You got to be ready to do anything if somebody dis’ your hood.
1996		J. Cameron It Was An Accident 227: Only you got your face to think about and they surely dissed me.
2006		G. Malkani Londonstani (2007) 56: Hardjit would’ve smacked them for dissin him, dissin his house, dissin his mum’s magazines, dissin the poster.
2014		A. Fox-Lerner ‘Traces of a Name’ in ThugLit Mar. [ebook] I was taking the Q train to meet a client when I saw that I'd been dissed by a dead kid.
2022		J. Hannaham Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit 83: Bitch, how you gonna diss your toothless-ass grandma?

3. to denigrate someone in public to the extent that it makes that person feel bad.

1988		Ice-T ‘Personal’ 🎵 I never diss an emcee, wish ’em all good luck.
1998		Hip-Hop Connection Dec. 8: And it’s even worse when rappers name journalists and dis them publicly.
2003		A.N. LeBlanc Random Family 128: The police would have seen him naked. Roxanne had been dissed.
2022		J. Hannaham Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit 45: [C]abdrivers honked for her attention, maybe macking on her, maybe dissing her.

4. to deliberately break an appointment or date without consulting the second party.

1992		Eble Campus Sl. Apr. 3: diss – ignore, get rid of [...] ‘I got dissed hard last night. My date didn’t show up, and he didn’t call or anything.’.
2001		N. Green Shooting Dr. Jack (2002) 73: Tuco held out on him, dissed him in subtle ways, made him call a few times.

5. to inform.

1999

Observer 18 July 10: They say she was dissing on the Park Lane gang. Informer. But she never.