negroid

Meanings

1. 1
   adj

   dated and offensive: relating to a discredited racial category formerly applied to people of sub-Saharan African ancestry on the basis of supposed physical traits

   The editor retained negroid only inside the historical quotation and added a note explaining that the classification is obsolete and offensive.

2. 2
   noun

   dated and offensive: a person assigned to that discredited racial category

   Modern anthropologists reject negroid as a noun because it treats socially constructed racial groups as fixed biological types.

Formed from Negro + -oid ("resembling; having the form of"). The term was used in now-discredited typological theories that divided humanity into supposed biological races. It is dated and offensive in current English except in careful discussion of historical language.

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