quarter-caste
quarter-caste adjective: having one "half-caste" parent; especially, having three Caucasian and one non-Caucasian grandparents.
Adjective
quarter-caste (not comparable)
- Having one "half-caste" parent; especially, having three Caucasian and one non-Caucasian grandparents
- So ignorant of her job was she that one quarter-caste kiddie I pointed out she said was a halfcaste, and to prove it called the child out and asked her, as one'd speak to a prisoner in jail, wasn't her mother a lubra.1938, Xavier Herbert, chapter VII, in Capricornia, page 107
- The issue of race discrimination in sport has been before the New Zealand public continuously for nearly four years. […] In 1959, the amateur golf champion, a boy just turned seventeen, described as a ' quarter-caste Maori,' withdrew from the New Zealand team to play in the Commonwealth...1962 October, The Crisis, volume 69, number 8, page 472
Noun
quarter-caste (plural quarter-castes)
- A person with one "half-caste" parent and one Caucasian parent
- I guess the sort of thing that happened to my mum has happened constantly to Aboriginal people over the years. That's why the whitefellas talk so much about which of us is full blood, half-caste, quarter-caste, and all that other rubbish. I reckon those kinds of images make people think that we are...2007, Ken Colbung in Sally Morgan, Tjalaminu Mia and Blaze Kwaymullina (eds), Speaking from the Heart: Stories of Life, Family and Country, North Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, p. 67...
- Protectors took the mixed-race children, ‘half-castes’, ‘quarter-castes’, ‘octoroons’, from their parents, from their culture, raised the light-skinned ones white, at an orphanage, and trained the darker-skinned ones to be domestic servants for the colonisers.2021 November 7, Claire [G.] Coleman, “Not quite blak enough: ‘The people who think I am too white to be Aboriginal are all white’”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 03 Dec 2021
Forms of quarter-caste
| plural | quarter-castes |
|---|
Origin of quarter-caste
From quarter + caste.
Questions about quarter-caste
- What does quarter-caste mean?
- Quarter-caste means having one "half-caste" parent; especially, having three Caucasian and one non-Caucasian grandparents.
- What part of speech is quarter-caste?
- Quarter-caste can be an adjective or a noun.
Words near quarter-caste in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: quarter-caste (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-quarter-caste.ogg.
Cite this entry: “quarter-caste.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/quarter-caste. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.