Politics & SocietyGreek → English
Ethnic
/ˈɛθnɪk/adjective
Relating to a group sharing descent, language or culture.
The Greek roots
ἔθνος
éthnos
people, nation, tribe
Literally: “belonging to a people”
Follow a root:ἔθνος5 words
The story of the word
In the Septuagint τὰ ἔθνη translated the Hebrew goyim, the nations that were not Israel, and the New Testament kept that use. So ethnic entered English in the fifteenth century meaning heathen or gentile, and held that sense for four hundred years; a seventeenth-century writer calling something ethnic meant it was pagan. The modern sense arrived through nineteenth-century anthropology, and ethnic cleansing, translating Serbo-Croatian etničko čišćenje, entered English in 1992.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Late Latin → English
- First recorded
- 15th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
ethnographyethnicityethnocentrism
In a sentence
The census asks about ethnic background in four different ways.