jive around
To jive around means to tease, mess with, or play games with someone — stringing them along without being straight with them.
Definitions
To jive around means to tease, mess with, or play games with someone — stringing them along without being straight with them. It's a dated bit of American slang rooted in the jazz-era use of "jive" to mean nonsense or deceptive talk. When you jive around with someone, you're not taking them seriously, giving them the runaround, or goofing with their head. The phrasing feels mid-20th century but still communicates perfectly.
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(slang, dated) To tease or mess with (someone).
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Regional slang from around the English-speaking world — British, Australian, Irish, Caribbean, Nigerian, Filipino, AAVE, and the hyphenated-English dialects that make the internet sound local.
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Semantically related
- jack around74%
To jack around means to mess about, waste time, or act like you've got nowhere to be. It covers two flavours: fooling around and causing low-level chaos, or dragging your feet and killing time when you should be doing something productive. Someone who jacks around is either being playfully disruptive or frustratingly unproductive — either way, they're not taking things seriously. A staple of American informal speech that's still going strong.
- jazz around73%
(slang, dated) To have fun, play around; to waste time with frivolity.
- mess around71%
(informal) To joke, kid, or play.
- jack around71%
(slang) To misbehave, fool around.