Interracial

How to spell interracial

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce interracial

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does interracial mean?

1. adjectiveExisting or occurring between people of different races.

Interracial in a sentence

• The couple celebrated thirty years of a happy interracial marriage.

• The documentary traced the history of interracial friendships in the town.

Where does interracial come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a compound built inside English from the prefix inter-, which comes from Latin and means 'between' or 'among', joined to the adjective 'racial'. The base word 'race' reached English in the 1500s through French, which had taken it from Italian razza, a term used for a breeding line, stock, or group sharing a common descent; the deeper origin before that is debated. The suffix -ial, again from Latin, turns a noun into a describing word, so 'racial' simply means 'relating to race'. Putting inter- in front gives the modern sense of something occurring between people of different races, a usage that became common from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The spelling trap lives at the seam: inter- ends in r and racial begins with r, so the word carries a double r in the middle that is easy to drop.

How the word is built

• inter- (between, among)
• rac- (from Latin/Romance race: a breeding stock or people)
• -ial (adjective suffix)