A: I want the cake with a cartoon piglet pattern on it. B: Sally called dibs on this one, so you’ll have to pick a different one. Note: When someone says that they call dibs on something, they claim or declare rights to that thing before anyone else. Dibs in this sense is children’s slang that goes back to the early 1900s. By mid-20th century, it had made its way into the more formal writing of some adult users of English, though even today dibs remains more prevalent among the young. The term is derived from an old children’s game called dibstones, which takes its name from the obsolete verb dib, meaning “to dab” or “to pat.” | 