a wordJimmies
also: sprinkles · hundreds and thousands · nonpareils
Boston and Philadelphia say jimmies. Say it in Los Angeles and you get a blank look.
The long rod-shaped sprinkles, above all the chocolate ones. The tiny balls are nonpareils.
First seen. 1930, as a cake topping
The Jimmy Fund story postdates the first record by eighteen years. Cited · wp-sprinkles
The story Cited · wp-sprinkles
Jimmies is the most popular term for chocolate sprinkles in Boston, Philadelphia and New England. The origin is uncertain; it is first documented in 1930, as a cake topping. The Just Born Candy Company of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, says it invented the product and named them after an employee.
A second story credits Sidney Farber's Jimmy Fund and Brigham's ice cream, which charged a penny extra for chocolate sprinkles to benefit it — but the fund started in 1948, well after the word is first recorded. Nonpareils go back to at least the late eighteenth century, as decoration for pièces montées.
The particulars
| part of speech | noun |
|---|---|
| region | The United States |
| confidence | high · updated 2026-09-16 |
Who it runs with
Who talks about it
Where we got it
- Sprinkles — Wikipedia · link
Where it came from: Cited a source we name · Harvested pulled from an open dataset · Tradition what the tradition says, hedged · Inference this project's reasoning · Field somebody stood there. This record as JSON.