Word.ws English Dictionary

gwailo

gwailo is the alternative form of gweilo.

Meaning of gweilo

Noun

gweilo (plural gweilos or gweilo)

  1. (colloquial, ethnic, slur) A white person in China, (particularly) a man; a ‘foreign devil’.
    • She had ruffled the bed and laid a frilly nightdress on the floor because so far as the block was concerned Phoebe was the half-kwailo bastard who whored with the fat foreign devil.1977, John Le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy, Folio Society, published 2010, page 179
    Synonyms:
    white person

Forms of gwailo

pluralgwailos
pluralgwailo

Questions about gwailo

What is gwailo the alternative form of?
Gwailo is the alternative form of gweilo.

Words near gwailo in the dictionary

  1. GWA
  2. Gwa'sala-'Nakwaxda'xw
  3. gwaai
  4. Gwabegar
  5. Gwadar
  6. gwailo
  7. gwailos
  8. gwaipo
  9. gwaipoh
  10. gwaipohs
  11. gwaipor

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gwailo (page history and authors); gweilo (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: “gwailo.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/gwailo. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.