hottentot
hottentot noun: any of several fish of the genus Pachymetopon, in the family Sparidae.
Noun (1)
hottentot (plural hottentots)
- Any of several fish of the genus Pachymetopon, in the family Sparidae.
Noun (2) capitalized: Hottentot
Hottentot (plural Hottentots)
- A member of the Khoekhoe group of peoples.
- I was told that the Hottentots were uncommonly ugly and disgusting, but I do not think them so bad. Their features are small and their cheekbones immense, but they have a kind expression and countenance.1798-1801, Lady Ann Barnard, Letters and Journals
- They were called "Bushmen" because they led a nomadic life based on hunting and gathering in bushveld. The first written appearance of the Khoisan people, represented by the Bushmen and the Hottentots, dates back to the tenth century.2014, Jirō Tanaka, The Bushmen: A Half-century Chronicle of Transformations in Hunter-gatherer Life and Ecology, Apollo Books, →ISBN, page 2
- A member of the broader Khoisan group of peoples.
- The Hottentots (Khoisan peoples) once an independent nation but whose simple tribal system had disintegrated rapidly as they were relentlessly displaced from their traditional grazing grounds and driven deep into the still uninhabited interior […]1978, Patricia Storrar, Portrait of Plettenberg Bay
- The Hottentots (Khoisan) of either sex, young and old, who were in the boor's service, always choose to sleep in the fireplace.2007, Frontiers
Proper noun capitalized: Hottentot
Hottentot
- The language of the Khoekhoe, remarkable for its clicks.
- Ive tried her with every […] possible sort of sound that a human being can make— […] Continental dialects, African dialects, Hottentot […] clicks, things it took me years to get hold of; and […] she picks them up like a shot, right away, as if she had […] been at it all her life.1912 (date written), [George] Bernard Shaw, “Pygmalion”, in Androcles and the Lion, Overruled, Pygmalion, London: Constable and Company, published 1916, →OCLC, Act III, pages 157–158
- Synonyms:
- Hottentot language, Khoekhoe
Synonyms of hottentot
Forms of hottentot
| plural | hottentots |
|---|---|
| plural | Hottentots |
Origin of hottentot
Borrowed from Dutch Hottentot, its first known use in Dutch being in the 1650s. The third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary concluded in 2008 that hottentot came into English in the seventeenth century. But it finds that no definitive etymology of Dutch hottentot can so far be given: A very large number of different etymologies for the name have been suggested ... The most frequently repeated suggestion ... is that the word was a spec. use of a formally identical Dutch word meaning ‘stammerer, stutterer’, which came to be applied to the Khoekhoe and San people on account of the clicks characteristic of their languages. However, evidence for the earlier general use appears to be lacking. Another frequent suggestion is that the people were so named after one or more words which early European visitors to southern Africa heard in chants accompanying dances of the Khoekhoe or San ... but the alleged chant is rendered in different ways in different 17th-cent. sources, and some of the accounts may be based on hearsay rather than first-hand knowledge. It does seem clear, however, that hottentot was an exonym, that is, not the Khoikhoi's own name for themselves but rather a foreign...
Words formed from hottentot
- Hottentot cherry
- Hottentot fig
- Hottentot teal
- Hottentot apron
- Hottentot bread
- Hottentot cabbage
- Hottentot's cabbage
- Hottentot's fig
- Hottentot god
- Hottentot's god
- Hottentot's cherry
- Hottentots Holland Mountains
- Hottentotism
Phrases with hottentot
Questions about hottentot
- What does hottentot mean?
- Hottentot means any of several fish of the genus Pachymetopon, in the family Sparidae.
- What part of speech is hottentot?
- Hottentot can be a noun or a proper noun.
- What is the plural of hottentot?
- The plural of hottentot is hottentots.
Words near hottentot in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: hottentot (page history and authors); Hottentot (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: “hottentot.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hottentot. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.