The term "swing dance" commonly refers to a group of dances that developed concurrently with the swing style of jazz music in the 1920s, '30s and '40s, although the earliest of these dance forms predate swing jazz music. The best known of these dances is the Lindy Hop, a popular partner dance that originated in Harlem and is still danced today. While the majority of swing dances began in African American communities as vernacular African American dances, a number of forms (Balboa, for example) developed within Anglo-American or other ethnic group communities.

The earliest forms of swing dance, such as the Black Bottom, charleston and tap dance, are associated with Dixieland jazz, which developed in New Orleans in the south of the United States. These sorts of dances traveled north with jazz to cities like New York, Kansas City, and Chicago in the Great Migration that began in the 1920s, where rural blacks traveled north to escape persecution, Jim Crow laws, lynching and, later, high unemployment in the South during the Great Depression.

Swing jazz features the syncopated timing associated with African American and West African music and dance — a combination of crotchets and quavers (quarter notes and eighth notes) that many swing dancers interpret as 'triple steps' and 'steps' — yet also introduces changes in the way these rhythms were played — a distinct delay or 'relaxed' approach to timing.

Today there are swing dance scenes in many developed countries throughout the world. Lindy Hop is often the most popular, though each city and country varies preferences various dances in different degrees. Each local swing dance community has a distinct local culture and defines "swing dance" and the "appropriate" music to accompany it in different ways.