High Five — Meaning & Origins

The high five — two raised open palms slapped together above head or shoulder height — feels like one of the most ancient and instinctive celebratory gestures imaginable, yet it's actually one of the youngest gestures on this site, with a documented origin in American sport only in the late 1970s. Unlike gestures with murky, centuries-old folklore origins, the high five's beginnings are unusually well-documented and specifically contested between two real, named athletes. This guide covers the genuine dispute over who invented it, how quickly it spread worldwide, and its now-universal role as a gesture of celebration.

Meaning & Origin

Today the high five means essentially one thing everywhere it's used: shared celebration, congratulations, or acknowledgment of a job well done, exchanged instantly and often wordlessly between teammates, friends, or even strangers in a moment of collective excitement. It requires no explanation and crosses language barriers instantly, which is part of why it spread so fast once it appeared.

What's unusual about the high five is how recent and well-documented its origin actually is. Two separate, credible claims exist, both from American professional sport in October 1977. One account credits Dusty Baker and Glenn Burke of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team: after Baker hit a home run, Burke reportedly greeted him at home plate with an enthusiastic raised-hand slap that became the team's signature celebration, a story often cited as the first recorded high five, notable also because Glenn Burke was one of the first openly gay professional athletes in major American sport, adding real historical weight to the story beyond the gesture itself. A separate, competing claim comes from University of Louisville basketball player Derek Smith, who is said to have originated a raised-hand slap with teammate Wiley Brown around the same period, with some Louisville players and sports historians arguing this predates or independently originated the gesture. Because both claims rest on personal recollection and team lore rather than contemporaneous written documentation, sports historians have not definitively settled which came first, and it's entirely possible the gesture emerged independently in more than one place around the same time, a phenomenon not unusual for simple, intuitive physical gestures.

Whatever its exact origin, the high five spread extremely quickly through American sports culture in the late 1970s and through the 1980s, aided by television coverage of games and by its obvious visual appeal and simplicity. It crossed into general popular culture well beyond sport within a decade or two, becoming a default celebratory gesture across much of the English-speaking world and, eventually, internationally, spread further by American film, television, and, more recently, workplace and classroom culture (the high five is now commonly taught and used deliberately in schools and offices as a quick, appropriate way to acknowledge achievement without a hug or handshake's greater physical intimacy).

Cultural Variations