My wife showed me a story about basketball in our local paper and asked “Why do they call assists ‘dimes’?” I (not being a basketball fan) was unfamiliar with the term, and so is the slangmeister Jonathon Green; the OED, however, in its dime entry (revised just this year), has:
6. Sport (chiefly North American). An especially precise or well-timed pass, esp. one resulting in or leading to a scoring opportunity. Cf. Phrases P.5b.
2008 He threw a dime to me, and I just tried to make it happen.
Calgary (Alberta) Herald 2 November f7/22015 The 5-foot-8..guard..dished a perfect dime to teammate Brittny Hoover standing under the basket.
Great Falls (Montana) Tribune 20 February s1/22023 Rose put in an absolute dime and I got on the end of it. I’m happy for the goal.
Boston Globe 27 July c8/1
Phrases P.5 [to drop a dime] b:
Sport (chiefly North American). Originally in Basketball: to make a precise or well-timed pass to a teammate for a shot at the basket. Later also in other sports: to throw an especially accurate or precise pass, esp. one resulting in or leading to a scoring opportunity.
1988 She can score in a variety of ways… What she is doing now is what the kids call dropping dimes—getting assists. She loves assists.
Detroit Free Press 24 October (Sports section) 6d/21991 ‘Dropping dimes’. No-one on the Nebraska basketball team is sure where that phrase came from. But the Huskers, who use it to describe a nice pass for a basket, are saying it a lot this season.
Omaha (Nebraska) World-Herald 5 February 20/12017 Buechele dropped a dime..to freshman running back Toneil Carter.
Daily Texan (Univ. Texas, Austin) 29 September 7/6
And there is a Stack Overflow thread on the topic; the first answer seems sensible:
There isn’t really a verifiable source on this, unfortunately, without perhaps doing a ton of research of old television announcers. I’ve never seen that.
What I have found so far, is that it likely dates back to urban slang, popular on the east coast (which is commonly attributed to Philadelphia and the nearby environment), which described “assisting” the police in an investigation as “dropping a dime”. That was due to the cost of a pay phone call back then – $0.10 – which would be used to call the police. That apparently transitioned to assists in basketball. Wiktionary shows these meanings, for example, and all sorts of online discussions support this – but nothing meaningful as proof unfortunately.
It’s also possible that it simply was directly related to the cost of a phone call, of course. The other terminology is fairly similar; a successful pass to someone that then scored off of it might be called “connecting with” that someone, for example, identically to if you connect a phone line. You feed them, same as you feed a pay phone dimes. There are a lot of small similarities that might either have been the initial connection, or reinforced it once it was made by someone.
I knew that the older form was “drop a dime,” and so I assumed that it (like the sense related to providing information to the police) originated with something to do with payphones. However, I could not figure the metaphor out any more specifically than that.
In mystery novels and movies of the early and middle twentieth century, “drop a dime” often meant to rat someone out, to denounce them to the police. The term became more generalizd, meaning to use a (pay) telephone. How and when it migrated to basketball assists is a mystery to me, but I’ve heard it used to mean ‘make a precise pass’ in women’s college basketball since I began following that sport about twenty-five years ago.
@cuchuflete: You have the order somewhat confused. “Drop a dime” referred to phone calls first, then informing to the police, then basketball passes.
@Brett: Thanks. Yes, that makes sense.
You can see the sense development at the first (Green) link; scroll down to “drop a dime.”
I hate to accuse Green of an error, but this seems wrong:
“ Note basketball jargon drop a dime, to shoot a three-point basket] (US)”
There are quite a few slang terms for the three point shot, but drop a dime is not one I’ve ever heard.
“ Three-point shot : A field goal attempt from behind a designated line. In international basketball, the line sits 22.1 feet from the basket at its furthest point. When made, the shot counts for three points. Slang terms include: long-range shot, triple, trey.”
Source: https://www.nbcolympics.com/news/basketball-101-olympic-terminology-and-glossary#:~:text=Three%2Dpoint%20shot%20:%20A%20field,range%20shot%2C%20triple%2C%20trey.
Also- From the arc, behind the arc, long distance, etc.
I only knew “drop a dime on” in the “rat someone out” sense (such is the selectivity of my reading.) The meaning was clear from context; the origin never occurred to me. Makes complete sense.
I hate to accuse Green of an error, but this seems wrong
Wow, thanks for catching that — I completely missed it, because he didn’t include it in the list of subsenses. And yeah, he seems to have misunderstood it. (Probably a cricket fan…)
For those curious as to when the literal sense of “drop a dime” became overtaken by inflationary events, I googled up a late 1981 story from the Washington Post headlined “Bell Pushes 25 Cents As Nationwide Pay-Phone Rate,” although it still apparently took most of the decade before a quarter rather than a dime was necessary pretty much everywhere in the country. But by 1991 you could get a smash hit record on the country & western charts that presupposed the new norm because titled “Here’s a Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares).” (I personally lived through the dime-to-quarter transition for payphones* and but used google because my memory of its timing did not seem very reliable.)
The earlier nickel-to-dime transition in pay phones is claimed to have occurred around the early 1950’s, and it would be delightful if there were some metaphorical turn of phrase in which the nickel rate for a phone call remained fossilized. A la “Put another nickel in / In the nickelodeon.”
*Also for jukeboxes but the timeline there may have been different plus sometimes there were more complex options like one song for a dime but three for a quarter.
“Pie and Punch and You-Know-Whats” was published in 1951 (only two years after “Music! Music! Music! (Put Another Nickel In)” was first recorded), and the jukebox already cost a dime in Centerburg then.
My father used to say, if someone called him long-distance and wanted to have a long conversation, “It’s your nickel.”
Random association with a pay phone, from The Paper Chase I did that once with one of my students, who was a couple years older than I was and I knew would be amused, but that was in the ’90s and I changed the dime to a quarter (in my best non-rhotic John Houseman).
I think the connection between being a police informant and making an assist in basketball is a little tighter than what’s been stated above. Isn’t informing on a criminal, especially for a monetary reward, sometimes called “assisting the police [or ‘the authorities’] in their investigation”? I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the verb “assist” used in that context. That would make it more natural to use the same “drop a dime” metaphor for what basketball players and scorers call an “assist” as a technical term.
“Assisting the police in their enquiries” in UK journalism usually seems to mean “brought in for questioning as a possible suspect but nof actually arrested (yet.)” Probably the result of someone dropping a dime on them, rather than itself a dime-dropping process.
Hmmm. Maybe I remembered it wrong. But are telephone informants also sometimes described as assisting? And do suspects interrogated in person sometimes “assist” by offering information in return for immunity or at least a lighter sentence? Not the same as doing that by phone, of course.
It is possible that this simply reflects my naturally suspicious nature … (we Calvinists always think the worst of people.)
But I do think of it as a journalese kinda-euphemism, allowing for deniability if need be.
I think it depends a bit on context.
“The police say that a number of people are assisting them with their enquiries” probably means that the police actually said “We’re working on it! We have several leads! Leave us alone!” whereas “The police say that a Swansea man is helping them with their enquiries” means that Interpol has finally caught up with me but they haven’t quite got their ducks in a row to actually arrest me yet (as opposed to meaning that I’m either advising them how to proceed or telling them that it was my next-door neighbour what done it.)
If criminal A helps the prosecutors secure convictions against A’s fellow criminals B and C, the hope is that (at least in AmEng federal-court jargon) A will be credited with providing “substantial assistance” and get a lighter sentence as a reward for doing so. I don’t think the analogy to an “assist” in basketball or ice hockey or what have you is particularly obvious and indeed I would think it quite strained if someone tried to explain it to me outside a context where the basketball sense of “dime” may suggest that someone somewhere actually bought the analogy for slang-coinage purposes. In basketball you assist your own teammate while the criminal providing substantial assistance has, as it were, switched teams mid-game for personal gain in order to help the “other team” against his own erstwhile teammates.
But I don’t think you say A is “assisting” in anything like that BrEng euphemism. If you use any verb it’s more likely to be “cooperate” and you sometimes hear what might be pejoratively referred to as “rats” or “turncoats” called “cooperators,” which is a pretty neutral-valence term. In an indictment you would leave their names out and refer to them as e.g. “COOPERATING WITNESS ONE” or “CW-1” on second reference. Cooperating witnesses should not be confused with confidential informants, as explained in this educational presentation: https://www.nacdl.org/getattachment/36faa04f-f281-4cec-bfd0-c1fa488f1208/manning-confidential-informants-and-cooperating-witnesses.pdf
So there’s no connection to turning on a dime? From the definitions I was expecting it to be a similar ‘land on one specific small space’ idea.
In the 1970’s in U.S. Northeast, a “dime bag, ” or “dime,” was a plastic baggie containing a small amount of marijuana that sold for $10. There were also nickel bags, for $5. Inflation being what it was in those years, the quantity in the dime bag was variable and sometimes disappointing. I had thought that dropping a dime meant informing to the police on the guy who sold dime bags. Sharing or giving a friend a dime bag was an act of generosity that the friend would enjoy, which fits with the basketball meaning.
At a slightly higher level of abstraction than the phrase Jerry Friedman’s father used, “to [DO SOMETHING] on ones own nickel,” remains current and seems likely to be a fossilized metaphor from using ones own nickel to pay for a phone call or conceivably do something else (like play a song on the jukebox) that required someone to put up the necessary nickel.
Green’s offers “nickel snatcher” (also nickel chaser or nickel grabber) as slang for “streetcar conductor” but the citations are all from the bygone era before a nickel was no longer a plausible literal fare to be paid for your ride.
“to [DO SOMETHING] on ones own nickel,” remains current
It’s still around, but Google ngrams has “on * own dime” overtaking “on * own nickel” around 2000 — by which time the phone metaphor was long obsolete in both cases.
Stack Exchange reminds us that “own” is not necessary in the phrase, and also has an example of “on his dime” from as far back as 1939, so maybe it didn’t start out as specifically a phone call, but just a small amount of money in general.
OED did enter “on a person’s dime” under dime (revised 2024), with an earliest citation from 1930. But they missed “on a person’s nickel” under nickel (revised 2003). And “a person” is a bit too specific: there’s also “on the [company’s/government’s] [nickel/dime]”.
@ktscharz: thatnks for the interesting data, but at least in the legal-jargon variety of AmEng companies are persons too! (You will want to say “natural person(s)” if trying to exclude them.)
“drop a dime” to me only has the “call the police on” meaning, which i would bet emerged in relation to the permanent snitch lines that were widely publicized in the 1980s and 90s (and onwards). i would guess that the basketball version first appeared in a place where the snitch-line advertising uses the verb “assist”. those lines’ appearance as part of the ‘war on drugs’ (drugs are still winning, unsurprisingly) seems to me the only connection to “dime bag”.
even into the mid-1990s, there were some nickel payphones around: in the harvard square T stop, even as quarter phones became the norm, there was a lingering nickel phone at the end of the payphone bank closest to the bus platform.
drugs are still winning
Feature rather than bug. After all, some drug pushers have been major patrons of the arts.
Pure speculation, but my immediate thought went the the “dime” being especially precisely placed, and the dime being the smallest US coin. Anyone can hit a quarter, but you have to be good to hit a dime. See also: “Turn on a dime.”
Since it’s a perfect pass, I assumed it was related to “dime” meaning a woman who is a perfect ten.
Pure speculation, but my immediate thought went the the “dime” being especially precisely placed, and the dime being the smallest US coin. Anyone can hit a quarter, but you have to be good to hit a dime. See also: “Turn on a dime.”
I also would have guessed it was something to do with turning on a dime; somewhat surprised it’s apparently not.
Tech nerd question: Did they just send the charge pulses (Danish: takstimpulser) more often as prices increased? So if you used a dime phone, you’d just have to put in money quicker?
Where do telephones come in ?
#
Pulse charging refers to a charging technique that involves the interruption of current in pulses to reduce gassing in batteries, although it results in higher joule losses and longer charging time compared to continuous charging. The benefits of pulse charging are still debated within the scientific community.
#
This may only have been a thing in Denmark, but land lines used to have a counter for each subscriber (in the cabinet where the cable from the central office came in) that counted pulses — you’d get more frequent pulses for long distance calls than for local, and every so often a man would come by and read the counter so you could get your bill. Payphones were the same, each coin gave you a set number of pulses and you’d get cut off when it ran out. (AFAIR, there was a warning tone when you only had a few pulses left). I thought the system came from the US, but the concept seems to be unknown on the Internet.
For subscriber lines, you could just get into the cabinet and zero out your own counter. (Security was afforded by a triangular or square rotating rod in a circular hole, to which authorized personnel had a matching key. Everybody else just used a pair of flat-nose pliers). There may have been a trick involving magnets for payphones, or maybe that was for electricity meters.
nickel/dime/quarter payphone rates in the u.s. were/are about the initial payment for a local connection. the cost for time over the base unit, or for a longdistance connection, is a different story.
land lines used to have a counter for each subscriber … every so often a man would come by and read the counter so you could get your bill.
Distributed database, with the hope of eventual consistency !
For subscriber lines, you could just get into the cabinet and zero out your own counter.
Compensating transactions !
the concept seems to be unknown on the Internet.
Now why does that not surprise me ? Who is going to admit complicity in that Saga scam ?
On the other hard, some similar way of metering landline call duration must surely have been used in the olden days in America. How did telephone companies know how much to bill ? (Payphones were “pulsed” in some way, I (think I) just remembered. That could have been done by the switchboards, not in the booth).
On the other
hardhand …done by the switchboardsdone by the telephone exchange monitoring how much money was inserted in the payphone. That might have been signalled by one-way pulses to the exchange, without any signal from exchange to payphone.The first verse of a somewhat hokey/maudlin song that was a big hit in the U.S. in ’72 gives you a sense of what long-distance calls from a payphone were like in the olden days:
Sylvia’s mother says “Sylvia’s busy
Too busy to come to the phone”
Sylvia’s mother says “Sylvia’s trying
To start a new life of her own”
Sylvia’s mother says “Sylvia’s happy
So why don’t you leave her alone?”
And the operator says “forty cents more
For the next three minutes”
You then had some fairly short period of time, like 15 to 30 seconds, to feed the specified additional amount in coins into the phone or else you’d be disconnected. By a decade later it was an automated robot voice not a live human being telling you how much more money was required.
To Stu’s question, well into the 1990’s your monthly telephone bill in a typical US context would itemize each long-distance call you had made during the period the bill covered by number called, time called (rates were cheaper e.g. late at night), and length of call in minutes. I imagine the technology they had for logging it improved over time. I don’t know when it got automated enough that you didn’t have a live operator involved in connecting each and every long distance call, who could then essentially log it by hand and feed the record of it to the billing department. Before my own childhood, but I don’t know how much before.
By the 1970’s if not the 1960’s or even earlier there was a device called a “pen register,” which if attached to the correct wire in the correct place in the system would log (even for local calls) all the numbers called from such-and-such a phone. Whether law enforcement needed a warrant to use these and if so how much less of a showing of need they needed to make than for an actual wiretap (which unlike the pen register would enable law enforcement to listen in on what was being said during the calls and was thus significantly more intrusive to privacy) gave rise to plenty of opinions by federal judges etc. when the technology was new and the rules not yet clear.