Why do we call ‘shotgun’ to get the front seat?

Whenever a group of 3 or more people are about to travel in a car, the first person to say “shotgun” gets to sit in the front seat.

Being the first to call out “shotgun” earns you the most desirable seat in the car. Those who are victorious get the seat with the most legroom, the best view and easy access to the radio.

This is a tradition that spans decades, but why is it that we call out the name of a firearm to reserve the front seat? To answer this question we first need to go back to the Wild West and visit mid-19th century America.

During this period, horse-drawn stagecoaches were a common mode of transport. A ‘shotgun guard’ would sit next to the driver on a stagecoach in order to protect against bandits and highwaymen.

This would birth the term ‘riding shotgun’ which only began to come into public consciousness nearly a century later in western films and books. The rise in television which followed only helped to solidify ‘riding shotgun’ into American vernacular.

This explains why the front seat is sometimes known as ‘shotgun’ but doesn’t fully explain why we have a game where you need to call out this word to sit at the front.

Unfortunately, it is not clear how this specific development occurred, except its likely to involve the British concept of ‘dibs’.

Calling shotgun is very similar to calling dibs on something. Dibs is a word that can be traced back to the 17th century with a children’s game called ‘dibstones’. This game involved players shouting the word ‘dibs’ to win game pieces (stones).

The term would go on to transcend the game by becoming an informal word used to claim something in everyday life.

As a result, calling shotgun to claim a front seat combines the Wild West history of stagecoaches with an English Stuart-era children’s game.