octoroon

octoroon noun: someone having one-eighth black ancestry.

Noun

octoroon (plural octoroons)

(dated, historical) Someone having one-eighth black ancestry.
- Yet the least drop of Spanish blood, if it be only of quadroon or octoroon, is sufficient to raise them from the rank of slaves, and entitle them to a suit of clothes—boots, hat, cloak, spurs, long knife, and all complete, though coarse and dirty as may be,—and to call themselves Españolos, and to...1840, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Two Years Before the Mast, ch. XIII
- There would have been no legal barrier to their union; there would have been no frightful menace to white supremacy in the marriage of the negro and the octoroon: the drop of dark blood bridged the chasm.1900, Charles W. Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars, ch. XVIII
(dated, historical) Someone having 1/64th black ancestry: the child of a quintoon and a white man.
- Quintoon: child of mustiphini and white male
  Unspeakable: child of mustiphini and white woman
  Octoroon: child of quintoon and white man
  Unspeakable: child of quintoon and white woman2005, Donald Harman Akenson, Irish History of Civilization, page 353

They are octoroons and African half-bloods of various shades, but I fear we English think all foreigners are much the same so long as they are dark and dirty.1914, G. K. Chesterton, The Wisdom of Father Brown, chapter 9:
Grandmother Baxter was a quadroon or an octoroon, or in any case she was nearly white.1969, Maya Angelou, chapter 10, in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, New York: Bantam, published 1971, page 50:
That's Balthios, the octoroon great grandson of Lebron James.2008, Tales of Game's Studios, quoting Charles Barkley, Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, Tales of Game's Studios:

plural	octoroons
alternative form	octaroon

Borrowed from Spanish octorón; compare quadroon from cuarterón (“quadroon”).

What does octoroon mean?: Octoroon means someone having one-eighth black ancestry.
How do you use octoroon in a sentence?: They are octoroons and African half-bloods of various shades, but I fear we English think all foreigners are much the same so long as they are dark and dirty.
What part of speech is octoroon?: Octoroon is a noun.
What is the plural of octoroon?: The plural of octoroon is octoroons.

Adapted from Wiktionary: octoroon (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: 2026-09-02

Cite this entry: “octoroon.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/octoroon. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.