Nabe or Hood? A Brief History of Shortening 'Neighborhood'

"There Goes the Nabe: Up, Up, Up," a New York Times article from 2003, is about what happens when celebrities move into your neighborhood. But the headline, perhaps unknowingly, tells another story: the relatively recent ascent of the word "nabe," which, as my colleague Sara Johnson noted, seems to have come out of nowhere to become common parlance in today’s media (and even headline material in the linguistically conservative New York Times).

Real-estate blogs like Curbed rely heavily on "nabe." The Chicago Tribune has used the word, as has the Dallas Morning News and the Salt Lake Tribune. Generally, these publications do so "unglossed": without placing nabe in quotation marks or defining it in running text, indicating its general acceptance. There’s a national website for house-hunters called NabeWise.