Ethnicity

How to spell ethnicity

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce ethnicity

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ethnicity mean?

1. nounThe fact of belonging to a social group with a shared cultural, national, or ancestral background.

Ethnicity in a sentence

• The census form asks each resident to record their ethnicity.

• The hospital study tracked health outcomes across patients of every ethnicity.

Where does ethnicity come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to the Greek ethnos, which meant a nation, a tribe, or a people who share a common way of life. From that root came the adjective ethnic, which entered English in the late Middle Ages by way of the Latin ethnicus; curiously, its earliest English sense was 'heathen' or 'pagan', because translators used the Greek word for the gentile nations who were not Jews or Christians. Over the centuries the religious overtone faded and ethnic came to describe shared cultural, national, or racial background instead. The abstract noun ethnicity was built on top of ethnic with the familiar Latin-derived suffix -ity, and it is a relatively recent coinage, becoming common only in the twentieth century as social scientists needed a precise term for group identity. The spelling preserves the Greek 'thn' cluster intact, which is the part most writers hesitate over, since the three consonants in a row look unusual in English.

How the word is built

• ethn- (people, nation, from Greek ethnos)
• -ic (relating to)
• -ity (noun-forming suffix)