The term “black hole” was popularized by physicist John Archibald Wheeler at a conference in New York in 1967, but he didn’t come up with it on the spot. Someone in the audience shouted the phrase as a suggestion, and Wheeler seized on it as the perfect way to dramatize what happens when a star collapses so completely that nothing, not even light, can escape. The name stuck almost immediately, replacing the clunky technical language physicists had been using for decades.
What Physicists Called Them Before
Before 1967, scientists referred to these objects as “gravitationally completely collapsed stars” or “frozen stars.” Neither phrase exactly rolls off the tongue, and neither captured the public imagination. The underlying physics had been understood since 1915, when Karl Schwarzschild solved Einstein’s equations of general relativity and showed that if you compressed enough mass inside a critical radius, gravity would become so intense that light itself couldn’t escape. That boundary became known as the Schwarzschild radius, and the invisible surface it defines is what we now call the event horizon.
For decades, most physicists treated this as a mathematical curiosity rather than something that actually existed in nature. The idea of a real object with gravity strong enough to swallow light seemed too extreme. The lack of a vivid, accessible name didn’t help the concept gain traction outside theoretical circles.
The 1964 First Appearance in Print
Wheeler gets the credit for making the term famous, but he wasn’t the first person to put “black hole” in print. That distinction belongs to Ann Ewing, a reporter for Science News Letter (now Science News). In the January 18, 1964 issue, Ewing covered a scientific meeting where researchers described how an intense gravitational field could cause a star to collapse in on itself. “Such a star then forms a ‘black hole’ in the universe,” she wrote, beating Life magazine’s use of the phrase by a week.
Still, the term didn’t catch fire from that article alone. It needed a prominent physicist to champion it before the scientific community would adopt it as standard vocabulary.
Robert Dicke and the Prison Connection
The phrase “black hole” likely has roots that stretch back two centuries before any physicist used it. Robert Dicke, a distinguished physicist and Wheeler’s colleague at Princeton, had been comparing collapsed stars to the Black Hole of Calcutta as early as 1960. The Black Hole of Calcutta was a notorious prison cell in colonial India where, according to historical accounts, a large number of British prisoners were locked in a tiny room overnight in 1756, and many suffocated. The name became shorthand in English for any suffocating, inescapable space.
Dicke saw the parallel: matter falls into a gravitationally collapsed star and never comes back out, just as prisoners entered that cell and didn’t emerge. A 2018 paper tracing the history of the name argues that the full story “commends acknowledging its definitive birth to a partnership between Wheeler and Dicke” rather than crediting Wheeler alone. Whether the anonymous audience member at the 1967 conference was echoing Dicke’s usage, or arrived at the phrase independently, remains unknown.
Why “Black” and Why “Hole”
The name is descriptive in a straightforward way, which is part of why it works so well. “Black” refers to the fact that no light escapes. An object that emits or reflects zero light appears perfectly black. You can’t see it directly; you can only detect it through its gravitational effects on nearby matter and light.
“Hole” is slightly misleading. As NASA puts it, black holes aren’t really holes. They’re huge concentrations of matter packed into very tiny spaces. But from the outside, they behave like a hole in space: anything that crosses the event horizon falls in and doesn’t come back. The event horizon itself isn’t a physical surface like the ground beneath your feet. It’s a boundary, an invisible point of no return. Cross it, and the gravity is so overwhelming that every possible path, even for light traveling at 186,000 miles per second, curves back inward.
How the Name Spread Through Science
After Wheeler’s 1967 lecture, the term moved quickly from popular shorthand into formal scientific literature. By 1969, Roger Penrose used the phrase in a paper published in Rivista del Nuovo Cimento, writing about whether it was “possible to extract energy out of a ‘black hole.'” Note the quotation marks: even in a peer-reviewed journal, the term was still treated as informal enough to warrant them. Within a few years, the quotation marks disappeared, and “black hole” became the standard term in physics.
The name’s success came down to timing as much as linguistics. The late 1960s and 1970s were a golden age for black hole research. Penrose, Stephen Hawking, and others were producing breakthrough theoretical work. Having a punchy two-syllable name made it far easier for journalists and the public to follow along than “gravitationally completely collapsed object” ever could have.
A Tricky Translation Problem
Not every language welcomed the new terminology. In French, “black hole” translates to “trou noir,” which is also slang for a part of human anatomy. This created real problems for French-speaking physicists trying to deliver serious lectures on the topic. Discussions of how matter disappears into a black hole and can never be retrieved, combined with theoretical results like the proof that “black holes have no hair” (a real physics theorem about their simplicity), made the subject almost impossible to teach without laughter. French theoretical physicists were notably resistant to adopting the term, initially hoping the naming trend would pass. It didn’t, and they eventually had to make peace with it.
The discovery of Hawking radiation in the 1970s, which showed that black holes slowly emit particles and energy, only made the situation worse for French lecturers. The subject of black hole emissions added yet another layer of unintentional comedy to an already awkward translation.