Meaning

(offensive, ethnic slur, vulgar, see usage notes) A black person; a person of black African descent..

Definitions by Sense

1. (offensive, ethnic slur, vulgar, see usage notes) A black person; a person of black African descent.
2. (offensive, ethnic slur, vulgar, see usage notes) A member of any typically dark-skinned people (now especially in combinations like prairie nigger or sand nigger).
3. (African-American Vernacular) A friend, particularly a fellow black person (often as an informal term of address).
4. (figurative, especially African-American Vernacular, otherwise offensive) A person of any kind (particularly as a term of abuse).
5. (especially in comparisons, now offensive) A member of a group that is oppressed or marginalized in the manner of black people.
6. (now offensive) Any of various dark animals:
7. (archaic, electricity) An impurity in the covering of an electrical conductor which serves to make a partial short circuit, and thus becomes sufficiently heated to burn and destroy the insulation.
8. (archaic) A strong iron-bound timber with sharp teeth or spikes protruding from its front face, forming part of the machinery of a sawmill, and used in canting logs, etc.

Example Sentences

It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger—but I done it, and I warn't ever sorry for it afterwards, neither.

“Othello with his occupation gone,” she teased. “Othello was a nigger,” I said.

Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

You are not even a nigger, you are an African.

In a particularly sad portion of the Wells Report, Jonathan Martin laments being derided as a nigger to his face by Richie Incognito.

One day our troop was charged with building a monkey bridge, a kind of rope bridge built with logs. As we completed it and admired our work, a troop of white kids passed by and proceeded to call us niggers, shouting that niggers couldn’t build a bridge.

He never lost his appetite - He bigger grew and bigger; And proved, with every inch of height, A nigger is a nigger.

Word Forms

• niggers
• n****r
• n-word
• nigga
• niggah
• nigguh
• niggering
• niggered

Synonyms for nigger

Related Words

When Should You Use Nigger?

Use nigger when its meaning, tone and grammar fit the full sentence. A synonym is not always a direct replacement.

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