Word.ws English Dictionary

blackgin

blackgin noun: an Aboriginal woman.

Noun

blackgin (plural blackgins)

  1. (Australia, derogatory) An Aboriginal woman.
    • […] a man has got to go on day after day, week after week, year after year, fighting devils of loneliness and worse—with nothing to look at except miles and miles of stark staring gum trees and black, smelling gidgee and dead-finish scrub—and never the glimpse of a woman—not counting black gins—to...1915, Rosa Praed, chapter 7, in Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land: A Story of Australian Life, London: Hutchinson
    • Anna was of a lower caste than Nawnim. Her father was a Japanese. Therefore, according to the Law of the Land, which recognized no diluent for Aboriginal blood but that of a white race, she was a full-blooded blackgin and not entitled to franchise as Nawnim theoretically would be when he came of...1938, Xavier Herbert, chapter V, in Capricornia, page 73
  2. The plant Kingia australis.

Forms of blackgin

pluralblackgins
alternative formblack gin
alternative formblack-gin
alternative formgin

Origin of blackgin

From black + Dharug dyin (“woman”) (David Nash, "Placenames evidence for NSW pidgin" in Felicity Meakins, Carmel O'Shannessy (eds) Loss and Renewal: Australian Languages Since Colonization, Walter de Gruyter, 2016, p.133.) https://books.google.ca/books?id=spjUCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA133&lpg=PA133&dq=%22blackgin%22&source=bl&ots=PAH4wZMnI1&sig=6pQWiSTFpQV6FcU9ZFhRzaTkbbQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwim-YfEg9vMAhUK-GMKHccqA_0Q6AEI5AEwLw#v=onepage&q=%22blackgin%22&f=false

Questions about blackgin

What does blackgin mean?
Blackgin means an Aboriginal woman.
What part of speech is blackgin?
Blackgin is a noun.
What is the plural of blackgin?
The plural of blackgin is blackgins.

Words near blackgin in the dictionary

  1. blackfulla
  2. blackfullas
  3. blackgame
  4. blackgames
  5. blackgaze
  6. blackgin
  7. blackgins
  8. blackgirl
  9. blackgrass
  10. blackguard
  11. blackguarded

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: blackgin (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: EN-AU ck1 blackgin.ogg.

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