Gypsy
noun · first attested 16th century
The name preserves a five-hundred-year-old mistake about where Romani people came from.
A Romani person. Now widely regarded as a slur and rejected by many Romani people.
Record
- Relationship
- Named from the place
- Confidence
- Well attestedThe place link is the standard scholarly account.
- Attested
- 16th century
- Part of speech
- noun
Explanations here are written for this atlas. Dictionary text is not copied; the sources are linked so the claim can be checked.
- Step 1
Egypt
- In English
Gypsy
When Romani groups reached western Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries they were taken for Egyptians, partly because some carried letters of safe conduct describing a pilgrimage from Little Egypt. English clipped Egyptian to Gypcian and then Gypsy; Spanish gitano, French gitan and Greek gyftos come from the same error. Scholars showed in the eighteenth century that Romani is an Indo-Aryan language from northern India. It is treated as a slur today because it is a name imposed by outsiders on a false premise and carries centuries of stereotype with it, as in the verb gyp, meaning to cheat; in Britain and Ireland, however, the official category Gypsy, Roma and Traveller is still in use and some Romani people there apply the word to themselves.