nigger

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“
It's all right, Madame, but you might have told us that your nigger was a dummy.

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Definitions (18)

Toggle American Heritage definitions American Heritage Dictionary (3)

  1. noun Used as a disparaging term for a Black person: "You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger” (James Baldwin).
  2. noun Used as a disparaging term for a member of any dark-skinned people.
  3. noun Offensive Slang Used as a disparaging term for a member of any socially, economically, or politically deprived group of people: "Gun owners are the new niggers . . . of society” (John Aquilino).

Toggle Century definitions Century Dictionary (13)

Toggle GNU Webster definitions GNU Webster's 1913 (1)

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Examples (50)

  • "When a man gets a streak of luck,--nigger-luck,--he don't get tired. —  The Short-story
  • Worked like a nigger--from two to eight never stopped bandaging. —  The Dark Forest
  • I was angry at being called a nigger, and replied, "You don't know nothing, yourself, about it, and you expect a poor ignorant girl to know more than you do yourself; if you had any feeling you would get somebody to teach me, and then I'd do well enough She then gave me a wrapper to do up, and told me if I ruined that as I did the other clothes, she would whip me severely. —  From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or Struggles for Freedom
  • Then Mr. Pawkins amused himself asking Tryphosa if it was Maguffin or Timotheus was her young man, giving as his private opinion that the nigger was the smarter man of the two. —  Two Knapsacks A Novel of Canadian Summer Life
  • One thing was made manifest to me then, and confirmed later on, viz., the nigger is a game fellow; give him a little excitement, and he is full of "devil"--it's the doing of deeds in cold blood that finds him out. —  Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) Letters from the Front
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Etymologies (4)

Toggle American Heritage etymologies American Heritage Dictionary (1)

  1. Alteration of dialectal neger, black person, from French nègre, from Spanish negro; see Negro.

Toggle Century etymologies Century Dictionary (3)

  1. from nig + -er. Cf. equivalent niggard, n., 2.
  2. Formerly niger, neger, negar, neager; = D. G. Swedish Danish neger = Russian negrŭ, from French negre (16th century), now nègre, from Spanish Portuguese Italian negro, a black man, a negro: see negro. Nigger is not, as generally supposed, a “corruption’ of negro, but is regularly developed from the earlier form neger, which is derived through the French from the Spanish Portuguese negro, from which English negro is taken directly.
  3. from nigger, n. The ref. in def. 1 is to the blackened logs; in def. 2 to the imperfect methods of agriculture followed by negroes.
 

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/ˈnɪgər/
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