Who makes this, and how.

Who writes it

RebelOne Patois is written and maintained by the team at RebelOneMart, a Jamaican and Caribbean culture brand.

This is a first-language resource, not a compiled one. Every person in the family behind RebelOneMart was born in Jamaica — the brand's own account is “born in Jamaica, built in New York.” The music, the food, the Rasta movement and the way people actually speak were not researched for this project; they were the household. That is the qualification we are claiming, and it is the only one we claim.

We are not linguists, and we do not present this as academic work. Where a derivation is genuinely uncertain, entries say so rather than inventing one.

How an entry is made

A word does not go live until it carries a real definition, worked example sentences with translations, a plain-English pronunciation guide, its part of speech and register, and its origin where that origin is known. This is enforced by the build, not by good intentions: the content schema rejects a thin entry and the site fails to compile.

The result is 2,301 entries across 26 categories, plus a 32-phrase phrasebook. We would rather have a few thousand entries somebody can actually use than tens of thousands of one-line stubs.

Definitions explain how a word is used and how it differs from the nearest English equivalent. Vulgar, sexual and derogatory terms are included, because they are part of the language and people look them up — but they are labelled honestly and are never featured on the homepage or as Word of the Day.

Sources and licensing

2,266 of the 2,301 entries are original work written for this dictionary. 35 are adapted from A Learner's Glossary of Jamaican, published by the Open Grammar Project under CC BY 4.0. Those entries carry the credit on the entry page itself, not buried here.

We do not copy definitions from other Patois dictionaries. Where another site was used to discover that a headword exists, that is all it was used for — the writing is ours.

On spelling

Patois has no single official orthography. “Wah gwaan”, “wagwan” and “whagwan” are all correct; none is a misspelling of the others. Each entry is published under one spelling and lists the variants, and 3,302 alternative spellings redirect to the entry they belong to — so the spelling you know finds the word, whichever one that is.

What is not here yet

Audio. Pronunciation is written out phonetically, but there are no recordings. We will not use a text-to-speech voice for this: an English-trained voice reading Patois sounds wrong to anyone who speaks it, and would cost more credibility than the feature is worth. Real recordings are planned.

Words. The dictionary is still growing. Entries sometimes link to a word that has not been written yet; those links appear once the entry exists.

Corrections

If an entry is wrong, incomplete, or a definition does not match how you have heard a word used, tell us and we will fix it. Living language is regional and generational, and the people who grew up speaking it will always know things a dictionary does not.

Email patois@rebelonemart.com, or see the contact page.

Using this material

You are welcome to quote entries in articles, lessons, videos and research with a link back to the page you took them from. Journalists, teachers and researchers can reach us at the address above.