Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. The interbreeding of different races or of persons of different racial backgrounds.
- n. Cohabitation, sexual relations, or marriage involving persons of different races.
- n. A mixture or hybridization: "There was musical miscegenation at a time when segregation was the common rule” ( Don McLeese).
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. Mixture or amalgamation of races: applied especially to sexual union between individuals of the black and white races.
Wiktionary
- n. The mixing or blending of race in marriage or breeding, interracial marriage.
- n. figuratively A mixing or blending, especially one which is considered to be inappropriate.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. A mixing of races; amalgamation, as by intermarriage of black and white.
WordNet 3.0
- n. reproduction by parents of different races (especially by white and non-white persons)
Etymologies
- From Latin misceō ("mix") + genus ("race"). (Wiktionary)
- Latin miscēre, to mix; see meik- in Indo-European roots + genus, race; see genə- in Indo-European roots + -ation. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“Beginning in the Reconstruction era, when the term miscegenation first was coined, she traces the creation of a racial hierarchy that bolstered white supremacy and banned the marriage of Whites to Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and American Indians as well as the marriage of Whites to Blacks.”
Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegination Law and the Making of Race in America
“Those are the sort of snots that believe "miscegenation" is Just Plain Bad ... or other such guff.”
“What we have with (sub -) cultures that condemn miscegenation is morality being itself unconscionable, the unethical masquerading as the ethical, prejudice wearing a disguise of piety.”
“Jefferson's claim of unalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence is, to Malcolm, an egregious example of miscegenation, where a Latin word is joined to an Anglo-Saxon prefix.”
“It was just 85 years ago, in 1922, in the fascinating case of Rollins v. Alabama, that a black man named Jim Rollins was tried and convicted for "miscegenation" -- the crime of having sex with a white woman.”
“Natural Law" has nothing whatsoever to do with "miscegenation" - it mainly promotes Chopric practices like”
“So, if someone insists that miscegenation is a crime against nature so "abhorrent" that we must join the lynch mob, no matter how many stand with him, no matter if we're the only person standing against him, we should nevertheless be ready, willing and able to challenge this self-righteous nonsense, to say, this is not a vice -- because this would be the more ethical response even if societal morés condemn us for refusing to conform.”
“The specter of cultural miscegenation is duly exorcized by insisting that this "second race" is really the progeny of an invading "Crescent horde" whose Moslem regions are "to intellect a desert space,/A wild without a fountain or a flower,/Where towers Oppression”
The Ruins of Empire: Nationalism, Art, and Empire in Hemans's Modern Greece
“Some states also passed so-called miscegenation laws banning interracial marriages.”
“He's the product of what used to be called miscegenation, a scenario that may still be more terrifying than a teen daughter's pregnancy in many American households.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘miscegenation’.
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Newly discovered
gambol, zabaglione, archness, gormless, chanteuse, plangent, churl, tonsure, métier, chordate, miscegenation, inchoate
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five syllables
ontogenesis, phylogenesis, concatenation, androgenesis, extra textual, inexorably, spagyrically, apophenia, iatrochemist, monocotyloid, morphological, parthenogenic and 941 more...
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Verba Dilecta
delectable, notate, pauciloquy, paucity, pauciloquent, paucify, interscapilium, uropygium, inferna, nota, equipollent, prepollent and 677 more...
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word tank
a couple words
logolepsy, nefarious, quintessential, tintinnabulation, serendipity, rhapsody, palimpsest, panoply, mellifluous, imbue, loquacious, garrulous and 174 more...
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addendumb's Words
fey, cockshut, redact, beatific, melange, arcanum, rarefied, dissemble, capitulation, detritus, ennui, anodyne and 381 more...
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Vocabulary
Words I come across while reading.
talus, echelon, onanistic, cabochon, avocation, charnel, moue, portentous, prolixity, astringent, hoary, patina and 165 more...
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New words
Words that are new to me.
autostrada, gimlet, clyster, gravida, skelped, nacreous, susurrus, intransigent, puissant, turbid, plangent, fungible and 99 more...
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Joe's list
Fissiparous Weekly Standard Nigeria a fissiparous country 3/2012
fissiparous, inchoate, punctilious, synecdoche, apocryphal, superadd, pedant, pedagogy, astigmatic, inter alia, aphoristically, eponymous and 131 more...
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spicolli's Words
terrapin, ravenous, fuck, sepulchral, garlic, suss, queer, curmudgeon, foodie, intricate, omphalos, subversion and 534 more...
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samuraizack's Words
floccinaucinihili..., pneumonoultramicr..., bombastic, existentialistic, velocipede, aglet, anatomical snuffbox, wonk, tang, funambulist, quakebuttock, flews and 390 more...
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List Erine
cool mint antiseptic
shalom, cattywampus, bourgeoisie, aerophile, traverse, grotto, epicurean, ex cathedra, nautilus, epitaph, lathe, continuum and 753 more...
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ADW1
obdurate, obstinate, behest, injunction, enjoin, circumspect, ensconce, discursive, lugubrious, doleful, somber, ken and 2476 more...
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kmalladi's favorites
edification, penchant, ablution, extricate, frank, triumvirate, trifecta, egregious, hoi polloi, articulate, antediluvian, brusque and 291 more...
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madamepsychosis's Words
mollify, salubrious, prandial, coup de grace, ineluctable, metempsychosis, pedant, conatus, oeuvre, laconic, solipsism, vapid and 265 more...
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My List
A list of words that I have generated over time.
cairn, cacodaemoniacal, abash, abject, abjure, abstemious, abhor, abnegate, abnegation, abscond, abstruse, acclivity and 702 more...
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lanklenmot's Words
ineluctable, prelapsarian, bien pensant, prospero, preternatural, gratifying, iconoclast, cineast, persnickety, tumescent, galvanize, pap and 887 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for miscegenation.
chained_bear I'm guessing the negative implication comes from racial biases, though that's a very interesting linguistic point, qroqqa. Aug 8, 2008
qroqqa I wonder if the negative implication this word has for some is in part due to misunderstanding it as containing the negative mis-. It doesn't: it's misc- "mix" plus gen- "birth, generation". Aug 8, 2008