Word.ws English Dictionary

dot or feather

dot or feather phrase: used to inquire whether a person described as "Indian" is a Native American or from the Indian subcontinent.

Phrase

dot or feather?

  1. (US, offensive) Used to inquire whether a person described as "Indian" is a Native American or from the Indian subcontinent.
    • Oddly, the only bons mots that this crowd can recall all have to do with India: Kenneth Jay Lane cites her “Indian? Dot or feather?” and others come up with puns about Chutney Marys and Chutney Miras or quick jokes about pujas.1993 May, Joan Juliet Buck, “A Mehta of Style”, in Vanity Fair, page 162

Forms of dot or feather

alternative formdots, not feathers
alternative formred dot or feather

Origin of dot or feather

A reference to the bindi and the feathered war bonnet. First attested in a 1993 Vanity Fair article, where it is attributed to Gita Mehta.

Questions about dot or feather

What does dot or feather mean?
Dot or feather means used to inquire whether a person described as "Indian" is a Native American or from the Indian subcontinent.
What part of speech is dot or feather?
Dot or feather is a phrase.

Words near dot or feather in the dictionary

  1. dot matrices
  2. dot matrix
  3. dot matrix printer
  4. dot matrix printers
  5. dot matrixes
  6. dot or feather
  7. dot painting
  8. dot paintings
  9. dot point
  10. dot points
  11. dot product

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dot or feather (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: “dot or feather.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dot_or_feather. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.