Word.ws English Dictionary

foreign devil

foreign devil noun: a foreigner.

Noun

foreign devil (plural foreign devils)

  1. (China, archaic, derogatory) A foreigner.
    • "Alas! I called him 'foreign devil' then. Chang, too, had much to learn." "He is speaking of Lord Macartney."1925 July – 1926 May, A[rthur] Conan Doyle, “(please specify the chapter number)”, in The Land of Mist (eBook no. 0601351h.html), Australia: Project Gutenberg Australia, published April 2019
    • Some liberals interested in reforming the law put out a questionnaire to poll public opinion on homosexuality. They got about two thousand people to answer the questionnaire but there were in the end only about five hundred responses. As usual most of these respondants were English, Europeans or...1982 December 18, Siong-huat Chua, Sam Sasha, Philip Fung, “Hong Kong And The Emergence Of An Asian Gay Consciousness”, in Gay Community News, volume 10, number 22, page 8

Forms of foreign devil

pluralforeign devils

Origin of foreign devil

Calque of Cantonese 番鬼 (faan1 gwai2, literally “foreign devil”)

Questions about foreign devil

What does foreign devil mean?
Foreign devil means a foreigner.
What part of speech is foreign devil?
Foreign devil is a noun.
What is the plural of foreign devil?
The plural of foreign devil is foreign devils.

Words near foreign devil in the dictionary

  1. foreign country
  2. foreign currencies
  3. foreign currency
  4. foreign debt
  5. foreign debts
  6. foreign devil
  7. foreign devils
  8. foreign direct investment
  9. foreign direct investments
  10. foreign exchange
  11. foreign exchange certificate

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: foreign devil (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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