this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2025
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Negro. It's descended from niger, which is latin for black. Over time, it got shifted into negre, negro, and other variants that became used as a descriptor of African peoples.
As the African slave "trade" kicked up, various and sundry more shifts occurred from the French and Spanish words.
What's kinda funny-weird is that the "hard r" version of the word came along fairly late in the game overall. Earlier pronunciations often lacked that hard r when used in the US slavery regions. Not because of southern drawl, which came later on as well, but because those harr r sounds at the end of words got dropped a lot in hinging multiple languages and accents.
Depending on where you go looking, it's sometimes stated that the French variation is one of the older ones, and (supposedly) never had a hard r in there to begin with.
But, in English, it goes back to before it was used as a slur at all. Waaaay back when, it was just a way of saying someone was dark skinned, and it African descent. It didn't have any weight to it beyond that because chattel slavery and all the bullshit that went with it hadn't kicked off yet. And the older form of that, neger, is the usual spelling, but would be pronounced neg-uh or neg-ah rather than as nig anything.
But, there's people that claim that the specific American version is derived from negro directly, as one of the pronunciations of negro back before the civil war was neg (or nig) ruh, as in someone saying negro as knee-guh-ro or neg/nig-uh-ro; with it eventually dropping that "o" from the end and picking the hard r back up from the latin niger.
The usual etymology is given as a direct line from latin to french and Spanish, then being merged into English and turning from negro to the N-word itself.
Actual original documents are not accessible reliably, and very few have been digitized, so us common folks tend to be limited to reading stuff written about that documents along with the conclusion of a given author. So grains of salt are needed whenever someone tries to be definitive online. Once you get past the etymology of it, which is well understood, there are dozen or so places and times where the word as we know it shifted on spelling and usage as well as pronunciation.
It's a pretty fucking trippy journey, no matter which path you look at for it
Also in spanish it still is this word, no? Did the Spanish and Portugese empire call them the N-Word as well?
Nah, iirc it was always negros (pronounced closer to nay-gross) in Spain at the time. No idea about the Portuguese, I just don't recall how it's pronounced or spelled, but afaik, their slang and slur words for black people were less focused on color, same as Spanish.
Pulling off of memory, I wanna say that the general derogatory terms vary a good bit, like in English, but with none of them being so directly and singularly used the way the n word is.
One that I vaguely recall was essentially calling them shit arabs, or shit moors. And I wanna say that another translates to goat fucker. That's Spanish, again I'm not as familiar with Portuguese terms on this because they never had as much presence here in the US. Means that the Portuguese terms didn't seep into the French and Spanish, much less English. A lot of the slurs for black people here in the US come from French or Spanish to some degree, though English speaking oppressors came up with plenty of their own as well.
But, yeah, negro just means black, so the word is still in use, and doesn't have a bigoted context directly. There's even variants that are considered nice, like negrita, which is often a pet name between couples where the woman/girl is black. There's a different weight to it than just saying "black" I'm English when derivatives like that are used.
Strangely, some South American Spanish speakers use blanco as a derogatory term for whites, though it isn't super common, as there are better ones in use.