Word.ws English Dictionary

African American

African American is the alternative form of African-American.

Meaning of African-American

Adjective

African-American (comparative more African-American, superlative most African-American)

  1. Of a person, pertaining to the African-American ethnicity.
    • The rioters overshadowed the message of peaceful protesters on prior days: They had called for justice for Gray, a 25-year-old African-American man who died from spinal injuries after police arrested him this month.2015 April 28, Ben Brumfield, “Baltimore riots: A few people tried to stop the unrest”, in CNN
    Synonyms:
    Afro-American
  2. (US, broadly, offensive, proscribed, sometimes) Black.
  3. Of or pertaining to the culture of African-American people.
    • African-American music

See all 5 meanings of African-American

Forms of African American

Adjective
comparativemore African American
superlativemost African American
Noun
pluralAfrican Americans

Questions about African American

What is African American the alternative form of?
African American is the alternative form of African-American.

Words near African American in the dictionary

  1. Africa
  2. Africa time
  3. Africa-Eurasia
  4. Africa-wide
  5. African
  6. African American
  7. African American History Month
  8. African American Vernacular English
  9. African Americans
  10. African angelshark
  11. African angelsharks

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: African American (page history and authors); African-American (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “African American.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/african_american. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.