Word.ws English Dictionary

kwailo

kwailo 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 kwailo

pluralkwailos
pluralkwailo

Questions about kwailo

What is kwailo the alternative form of?
Kwailo is the alternative form of gweilo.

Words near kwailo in the dictionary

  1. Kwagu'ł
  2. kwai
  3. Kwai Chung
  4. kwai muk
  5. Kwai Tsing
  6. kwailo
  7. kwailos
  8. kwaito
  9. Kwaj
  10. Kwajalein
  11. Kwak

Source and license

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