Writing in 1904, journalist Clifton Johnson documented the "opprobrious" character of the word nigger, emphasizing that it was chosen in the South precisely because it was more offensive than "colored" or "negro". In 1851, the Boston Vigilance Committee, an abolitionist organization, posted warnings to the Colored People of Boston and vicinity. The term " colored" or "negro" became a respectful alternative. "The noun slipped back and forth from derogatory to endearing." īy 1859 the term was clearly used to offend, in an attack on abolitionist John Brown. This passage from Ruxton's Life in the Far West illustrates the word in spoken form-the speaker here referring to himself: "Travler, marm, this niggur's no travler I ar' a trapper, marm, a mountain-man, wagh!" It was not used as a term exclusively for blacks among mountain men during this period, as Indians, Mexicans, and Frenchmen and Anglos alike could be a "niggur". "Niggur" was evidently similar to the modern use of " dude" or "guy". George Fredrick Ruxton used it in his " mountain man" lexicon, without pejorative connotation. During the early 1800s to the late 1840s fur trade in the Western United States, the word was spelled "niggur", and is often recorded in the literature of the time. 18th and 19th century United Statesĭuring the late 18th and early 19th century, the word "nigger" also described an actual labor category, which African American laborers adopted for themselves as a social identity, and thus white people used the descriptor word as a distancing or derogatory epithet, as if "quoting black people" and their non-standard language. Lexicographer Noah Webster suggested the neger spelling in place of negro in his 1806 dictionary. An early occurrence of neger in American English dates from 1625 in Rhode Island. Later American English spellings, neger and neggar, prevailed in New York under the Dutch and in metropolitan Philadelphia's Moravian and Pennsylvania Dutch communities the African Burial Ground in New York City originally was known by the Dutch name Begraafplaats van de Neger (Cemetery of the Negro). In the colonial America of 1619, John Rolfe used negars in describing the African slaves shipped to the Virginia colony. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first derogatory usage of the term nigger was recorded two centuries later, in 1775. The earliest known published use of the term dates from 1574, in a work alluding to "the Nigers of Aethiop, bearing witnes". In its original English-language usage, nigger (also spelled niger) was a word for a dark-skinned individual. Etymologically, negro, noir, nègre, and nigger ultimately derive from nigrum, the stem of the Latin niger ('black').
The variants neger and negar derive from various Romance words for 'black', including the Spanish and Portuguese word negro (black) and the now-pejorative French nègre.
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