1967: a thousand place names in the US still have he word “nigger” in them.īy the late 1700s, at the latest, the word had become racist.1944: nigra (possibly worse than “nigger” itself).1878: nigger heaven (upper gallery in segregated theatres).1550s: Negro, probably from Spanish or Portuguese, where it simply means “black”.Timeline (when words first appeared in writing): It means a black person but has behind it hundreds of years of white racist contempt, particularly when it comes out of the mouth of a white person. The N-word is the word “nigger”, one of the three truly taboo words left in Standard English in 2013 (the other two start with c and f).
