quintroon

English[edit]

From Spanish quinterón (“the offspring of a quadroon and a white person”).

quintroon (plural quintroons)

(dated) The offspring of an octoroon (1/8 black) and a white person: 1/16 black
(dated) The offspring of a mustiphini (1/16 black) and a white person: 1/32 black
- 1828, Marly, Or, A Planter's Life in Jamaica‎^[1], page 183:
  Some authors, who have treated on the West Indies, do not count so far; but the writer of this, has seen more than one family of Quintroons by Mustiphini mothers in a state of slavery; which of course, would not have been the case, had they been those persons called white by law.
- 1833 Frederic William Naylor Bayley Four Years' Residence in the West Indies p. 493
  "A samboe," says he, is the nearest remove from black, being the child of a mulatto father and a negro woman, or vice versa; a mulatto is the offspring of a white man by a negress; a quadroon is the offspring of a white man and a mulatto mother; the child of a quadroon by a white man is a mustee; the child of a white man by a mustee woman is a mustiphini; the child of a mustiphini by a white father is a quintroon; and the child of a quintroon by a white woman is free by law." Among all these names, hard to pronounce and harder to remember, the samboe or mongrel, as it is oftener called, the mulatto and the mustee, are the only distinctions between the black and white that really pass current, though more have been defined;