ethnics
- 1Plural of ethnic. Dated, and often considered offensive.
Mid-century reporters wrote of the city's ethnics, meaning the people of its Polish, Italian and Irish neighborhoods.
Politicians courted the city's ethnics in the weeks before the election.
Note
The adjective ethnic is put to work as a countable noun here, and the plural turns a word for shared racial, national, religious or cultural origins into a label for people. In current use it means members of immigrant or minority communities, and it appears most often in sociological and political writing. Two older uses share the spelling: heathens or pagans, now archaic, and the citizens of an ancient Greek city.
ethnics is a form of ethnic
ethnic, noun: A person regarded as ethnic, especially a foreigner or a member of an immigrant community. Full entry
- Forms
- ethnicethnics plural
- Spelling
- ethnic → ethnics: add -s
- Sound
- The ending sounds like /s/.
Use it in a sentence
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