black legend
black legend noun: historiographical phenomenon in which a sustained trend in historical writing of biased reporting and introduction of fabricated, exaggerated and/or decontextualized facts is directed against particular persons, nations or institutions with the intention of creating a distorted and uniquely inhuman image of them. Also the alternative letter-case form of Black Legend.
Noun
black legend (plural black legends)
- Historiographical phenomenon in which a sustained trend in historical writing of biased reporting and introduction of fabricated, exaggerated and/or decontextualized facts is directed against particular persons, nations or institutions with the intention of creating a distorted and uniquely inhuman image of them.
Proper noun capitalized: Black Legend
the Black Legend
- The depiction of Spain and Spaniards (or, by extension, all Hispanics and their countries of origin) as bloodthirsty and cruel, greedy and fanatical, especially concerning the colonial period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.
- […]if the black legend seemed to be fading at last, the horrors of the Civil War revived it with a vengeance. Never was a conflict fought more bitterly.1964, Jan Morris, “Wild Spain”, in Spain, Faber and Faber, published 2008, →ISBN
- Here the problem is aggravated by the mutually reinforcing influences of the ‘black legend’ of Spanish greed and cruelty, and the contrasting myth of the American Indian as ‘noble savage’.1992, Edwin Williamson, The Penguin history of Latin America, London; New York: Penguin Books, →ISBN, page 84
Also used as
black legend is also the alternative letter-case form of Black Legend.
Forms of black legend
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | black legends |
| Proper noun | |
| alternative form | black legend |
Origin of black legend
Genericized use of Black Legend, a calque from Spanish Leyenda Negra coined by Julián Juderías in his 1914 book La Leyenda Negra y la Verdad Histórica. The Spanish term is in turn likely a calque of French légende noire, an expression by Arthur Lévy in his 1893 book Napoléon intime.
Calque of Spanish Leyenda Negra (literally “Black Legend”).
Questions about black legend
- What does black legend mean?
- Black legend means historiographical phenomenon in which a sustained trend in historical writing of biased reporting and introduction of fabricated, exaggerated and/or decontextualized facts is directed against particular persons, nations or institutions with the intention of creating a distorted and uniquely inhuman image of them.
- What part of speech is black legend?
- Black legend can be a noun or a proper noun.
- What is the plural of black legend?
- The plural of black legend is black legends.
Words near black legend in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: black legend (page history and authors); Black Legend (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.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “black legend.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/black_legend. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.