Word.ws English Dictionary

brass ankle

brass ankle noun: a person whose racial heritage is regarded as primarily white, but with a small degree of known or suspected non-white ancestry. A manifestation of the American “one-drop rule” of racial categorization.

Noun

brass ankle (plural brass ankles)

  1. (Southern US) A person whose racial heritage is regarded as primarily white, but with a small degree of known or suspected non-white ancestry. A manifestation of the American “one-drop rule” of racial categorization.
    • Moreover, the Maroons also practiced the diversions of polygamy. Their women, being a mixture of negro and native Indian, possessed a defiant beauty, not unlike that of an equivalent racial mixture, the “Brass Ankle” girls at Charleston. The men were tall and handsome and well made, and had a wild...1937, Richardson Little Wright, “Ⅸ”, in Revels in Jamaica, 1682–1838, Binghamton, New York: Vail-Ballou Press, →OCLC, →OL, Maroon Fun, page 232

Forms of brass ankle

pluralbrass ankles

Questions about brass ankle

What does brass ankle mean?
Brass ankle means a person whose racial heritage is regarded as primarily white, but with a small degree of known or suspected non-white ancestry. A manifestation of the American “one-drop rule” of racial categorization.
What part of speech is brass ankle?
Brass ankle is a noun.
What is the plural of brass ankle?
The plural of brass ankle is brass ankles.

Words near brass ankle in the dictionary

  1. Braslaw
  2. brasofensine
  3. brasque
  4. brasques
  5. brass
  6. brass ankle
  7. brass ankles
  8. brass balls
  9. brass band
  10. brass bands
  11. brass button

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: brass ankle (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: “brass ankle.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/brass_ankle. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.