nigger
Meanings
Plural: niggers
Noun
- (ethnic slur) extremely offensive name for a Black person
- A black person; a person of black African descent.
- A black person; a person of black African descent.
- A person of black African descent who behaves badly or unconventionally (whether the speaker approves or disapproves).
- A member of any typically dark-skinned people (now especially in combinations like prairie nigger or sand nigger).
- A friend, particularly a fellow black person (often as an informal term of address).
- A person of any kind (particularly as a term of abuse).
- A member of a group that is oppressed or marginalized in the manner of black people.
- Any of various dark animals:
- Any member of species Girella tricuspidata (luderick).
- Any of various dark animals:
- A dark brown nymphalid butterfly, Orsotriaena medus, of south Asia, southeast Asia, and Australia.
- Any of various dark animals:
- A kind of sea cucumber, Holothuria forskali, the cotton-spinner.
- Any of various dark animals:
- The larva of the turnip sawfly, an agricultural pest.
- An impurity in the covering of an electrical conductor which serves to make a partial short circuit, and thus becomes sufficiently heated to burn and destroy the insulation.
- A strong iron-bound timber with sharp teeth or spikes protruding from its front face, forming part of the machinery of a sawmill, and used in canting logs, etc.
- A steam-capstan on some Mississippi river boats, used to haul the boat over bars and snags by a rope fastened to a tree on the bank.
- A black screen used in conjunction with the camera to block light or produce special lighting effects.
Verb
- To clear land by laying light pieces of round timber across the trunks of the trees and setting fire to them at the point of contact, by which means the trees are slowly burned through.
- To exhaust (soil) by cropping it year by year without manure.
- To perform in blackface.
- To behave as a stereotypical black person.
- To treat as inferior.
Origin / Etymology
Probably immediately from Middle French nègre or Spanish and Portuguese negro (“a black person”); ultimately from Latin niger (“black”), thus a doublet of negro and noir. Compare Danish nigger, Swedish neger, German Nigger, Dutch nikker. First use appears c. 1577, in the writings of Edward Hellowes (fl. 1574–1601). The expected Modern English pronunciation would be with /iː/; compare neger. The modern pronunciation with /ɪ/ may be due to influence from the Latin etymon (compare the older Southern US pronunciation of negro with /ɪ/), but compare the dialectal American pronunciations of eagle and eager as /ˈɪɡəl/ and /ˈɪɡɚ/.
Synonyms
blackie, bootlip, brillo pad, coon, darkie, groid, homie, jigaboo, jogger, jungle bunny, kaffir, moon cricket, nig-nog, nigga, nigra, porch monkey, Sambo, shitskin, smoked Irishman, spade, spearchucker, spook, tar baby, wog
Scrabble Score: 8
nigger is not valid in Scrabble (US) TWL Dictionarynigger is not valid in Scrabble (MW) Merriam-Webster Dictionary
nigger is a valid Scrabble Word in International Collins CSW Dictionary