Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Pertaining to or characteristic of a nigger.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective derogatory, offensive, ethnic slur Like or characteristic of a nigger.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

nigger +‎ -ish

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Examples

  • Now be it known, that Aunt Judy's piety was in no respect of the niggerish kind; when I say "colored," I mean one thing, respectfully; and when I say "niggerish," I mean another, disgustedly.

    The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 Various

  • Auntie's piety was not of the niggerish kind, even Zoe, "The Octoroon," or any other woman or man in whose veins courses the blood of Ham four times diluted, knows that I mean it was not that glory-hallelujah variety of cunning or delusion, compounded of laziness and catalepsy, which is popular among the shouting, shirt-tearing sects of plantation darkies, who "git relijin" and fits twelve times a year.

    The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 Various

  • I kept school in New York and New Jersey and had among my scholars from the unmitigated jet black down to the nicest dissolving hue; and I have found white men as niggerish as black men; and have seen white boys with retreating foreheads and projecting jaws, heads that if you knocked here (tapping his own forehead) all day -- as a writer says -- you would find nobody at home.

    Men of Maryland George Freeman 1914

  • "I'd like ter give it ter you, if you won't be a thinkin 'it's free-niggerish of me."

    The Comings of Cousin Ann Emma Speed Sampson 1907

  • Even in our own fantasies the idea of a black president was so ridiculous that Pryor knew we could imagine the man as niggerish enough to fist-fight a journalist who slagged his mother (instead of doing what he’d really do: call the Secret Service or the C.I.A. and have the man discredited, framed, and thrown in jail).

    Obama Wins: The Biggest News Since the End of Slavery: Touré Tour&233; 2008

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