How did the n-word originate and what were its earliest documented uses in the 17th and 18th centuries?
Executive summary
The n-word derives from Latin niger, meaning “black,” passed through Romance languages into English as a descriptor for dark-skinned people and appears in print as early as 1574; by the 17th and 18th centuries it was commonly used in European and colonial texts about Africans and the slave trade, and scholars trace its shift from neutral descriptor to a pejorative term during the 18th century [1] [2] [3]. Sources disagree in emphasis—some stress a slow semantic drift from neutral term to slur, others emphasize the word’s embedment in slavery-era degradation—but the documentary record points to early descriptive uses followed by increasingly derogatory connotations by the late 18th century [3] [4] [1].
1. Etymological roots: from Latin niger to English usage
Linguists trace the word’s root to Latin niger, “black” (also glossed “dark, unlucky”), which in late Latin extended to mean “black person,” and that lineage carried into English and other European languages as forms referring simply to skin color [1] [5]. Multiple reference works, including the Oxford English Dictionary as reported in public radio and academic summaries, give this Latinate ancestry and place related words in English usage from the early modern period onward [2] [1].
2. Earliest printed appearances and the 16th–17th century record
The earliest known published English instance cited in reference works dates to 1574, where a writer alludes to “the Nigers of Aethiop,” showing that English authors used a cognate as a geographic or racial descriptor well before mass North American slavery [3]. By the 17th century, variations of the term appear in the context of European encounters with Africa and in writings tied to the Atlantic slave trade; historians and journalists note those 17th‑century appearances as largely descriptive in surviving documents [4] [2].
3. 18th century: entrenchment in Atlantic slavery and semantic shift
As the transatlantic slave trade expanded in the 17th and 18th centuries, English speakers increasingly used the term in colonial settings to refer to enslaved Africans, and scholars mark the mid‑to‑late 18th century as the period when the word began to take on pejorative force in many uses [4] [3] [1]. The Oxford English Dictionary is cited for recording the first explicitly derogatory usage around 1775, and secondary accounts place a cultural and linguistic hardening of contemptuous senses through the late 18th and early 19th centuries as racial hierarchies hardened under slavery [3] [1].
4. How historians interpret “descriptor” versus “slur” in early sources
Some historians and commentators emphasize that early citations often functioned as neutral descriptors—semantic cousins of “Negro”—and only degenerated into an overt slur later [1] [4], while others stress that even “descriptive” uses in slave-era sources were embedded in unequal, dehumanizing contexts that foreshadowed and facilitated derogatory uses [6] [7]. The academic literature warns against reading words outside their social context: a form that appears neutral on the page can carry violent social meaning when deployed within systems of enslavement [1].
5. Afterword: historical record, modern interpretations, and limits of the sources
Contemporary summaries—from encyclopedias to media outlets—converge on the same arc (Latinate origin → early modern descriptive use → 18th‑century pejoration), and they also note later cultural phenomena such as reappropriation in African‑American speech—but the precise chronology and tone in particular 17th‑ and 18th‑century documents require case‑by‑case archival work beyond these secondary overviews [8] [5] [3]. The sources supplied summarize the broad trajectory and point to a first printed instance in 1574 and a documented derogatory sense by the 1770s, while leaving detailed primary‑text timelines and regional variation to deeper historical scholarship [3] [1].