Talk:negro

Venezuela

In Venezuela the locution "Negro(a)" is an affectionate expression toward a beloved person — This unsigned comment was added by 190.216.251.65 (talk).

English language: tagged as "offensive"

This word is tagged as "offensive" in English. Is there good evidence to show that it's broadly offensive throughout the English-speaking world, or is it primarily just in the USA? 120.17.111.60 11:08, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

It is offensive in the UK. Equinox ◑ 18:35, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

RFV discussion: December 2019–January 2020

This entry has survived Wiktionary's verification process (permalink).

Please do not re-nominate for verification without comprehensive reasons for doing so.

---

negro

Spanish for "ghost writer". Equinox ◑ 11:32, 15 December 2019 (UTC)

[1] (translated to Spanish; the original English has ghostwriter), [2], [3].  --Lambiam 13:40, 15 December 2019 (UTC)

• RFV-kept. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 04:14, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

Pluralization

@Equinox - I see you added an example of the -s pluralization. It's not under debate that such non-standard forms show up - especially in old literature. It is not, however, the standard pluralization. I don't have access to the OED but [4], [5], [6] , and [7] all list "es" as the plural form and do not list "s". Besides, the OED has a reputation of being over-complete at times - it including it quite possibly is more just acknowledging the non-standard form exists, which again, I'm not disputing. However, it should be listed as non-standard - if it was really so standard, it should have showed up somewhere, anywhere else. OED is the odd one out here. SnowFire (talk) 05:51, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

Is citeable, looks normal. Internet anon saying "OED sucks" will not win. Equinox ◑ 02:13, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

FWIW, Google Books Ngram Viewer has "negros" being about 1/10th as common as "negroes", but many hits are probably of phrases in Spanish, Portuguese etc mentioned within English books; to try and keep out non-English examples, I searched for "of negros" and "for negros" which are more like 1/30th as common over the last 30 years, and markedly less common before that. On one hand, this is not very common, and I accept that we don't want to put every attested inflected form on the headword line (uncommon nonstandard ones should go elsewhere, such as usage notes), OTOH this is more common than, say, "of tomatos", which is only 1/600th as common as "of tomatoes". (How does the OED feel about tomatos, which we currently label a misspelling?) One obvious thing we could do is put a usage note like "many dictionaries[1][2][3][4] only accept the plural negros, but the Oxford English Dictionary also accepts negros[5]". We could also mention the relative commonness of the two. I notice the American Heritage Dictionary only has negroes, too; if the split were US vs UK, that could be worth mentioning too, but in practice it seems like not all UK dictionaries accept negros. - -sche (discuss) 15:26, 1 October 2021 (UTC)