ethnicity
Pluralethnicities (some meanings)
- 1The shared heritage that marks out a people, above all their common ancestry, culture, and language or their national history.
Her novels explore ethnicity and belonging among the children of immigrants.
Researchers studied how ethnicity shapes the way families celebrate weddings.
- 2A group of people who share a common ethnic background.
No single ethnicity makes up a majority of the city's population.
Children from a dozen ethnicities share the same classroom.
- 3A softer, more polite word for race or for common ancestry.
The police report gave the suspect's ethnicity only as white.
People keep asking about my ethnicity because of my dark skin and curly hair.
Similarrace, background, heritage, ancestry
Note
Casual speech often reaches for ethnicity when it means race, because the word sounds softer and less loaded: a stranger curious about someone's skin or hair may ask about their ethnicity rather than their race. Careful writing keeps the two apart and saves ethnicity for shared culture and ancestry, since a report that gives someone's ethnicity as white is really naming a race.
Practice
Can you tell the meanings of ethnicity apart? Answer 3 quick questions from this page, or write your own sentence and AI will check it.
Origin
Formed from ethnic + the suffix -ity.