Word.ws English Dictionary

octoroons

octoroons is the plural of octoroon.

Meaning of octoroon

Noun

octoroon (plural octoroons)

  1. (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
  2. (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

Questions about octoroons

What is octoroons the plural of?
Octoroons is the plural of octoroon.

Words near octoroons in the dictionary

  1. octoradiate
  2. octoradiated
  3. Octorara
  4. Octoraro
  5. octoroon
  6. octoroons
  7. octos
  8. octosaccharide
  9. octose
  10. octoses
  11. octospermous

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: octoroons (page history and authors); 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.

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