Word.ws English Dictionary

sand nigger

/ˈsænd ˌnɪɡəɹ/

sand nigger noun: a person of Middle Eastern or North African descent.

Noun

sand nigger (plural sand niggers)

  1. (derogatory, ethnic, offensive, slur) A person of Middle Eastern or North African descent.
    • When school got cancelled because of a bomb threat, I overheard classmates saying that it was probably my friend Abdullah who did it while they called him a sand nigger terrorist.
    • “…Nayeri shed both her accent and her Iranian identity to fit in her new home, where she thought she could grow up believing in herself. Her story is about the transplant’s struggle for acceptance in a society where discrimination is rampant. In Oklahoma, kids called her, among other vulgarities...2019 September 5, “The Ungrateful Refugee reviewed in the New York Times”, in Institute for Ideas and Imagination
    1. (derogatory, ethnic, offensive, slur) A Muslim.

Examples of sand nigger in a sentence

  • ' Lafferty would say the Islamic art was made by ' sand niggers '.1996, Pony Duke, Jason Thomas, Too Rich: The Family Secrets of Doris Duke, page 206:
  • […] which included a drive-by shooting at a mosque in Stillwater, Oklahoma, and verbal and physical assaults on Muslims who were called “sand niggers."2003, Jennifer Spangler, A Memorial to Terrorism's Victims, page 7:
  • One teenage interviewee described separate incidents in which two brothers were called sand niggers, and one was brutally beaten.2008, Katherine Pratt Ewing, Being and Belonging: Muslims in the United States Since 9/11, page 84:
  • They were the new type of niggers to all the Navy men and us, and veterans in our town called them “sand niggers."2015, Jared William Carter, The Southern Saint of Tennessee:

Forms of sand nigger

pluralsand niggers
alternative formsandnigga
alternative formsand-nigger
alternative formsandnigger

Origin of sand nigger

From sand + nigger, referring to the several deserts located in much of the region.

Questions about sand nigger

What does sand nigger mean?
Sand nigger means a person of Middle Eastern or North African descent.
How do you use sand nigger in a sentence?
' Lafferty would say the Islamic art was made by ' sand niggers '.
What part of speech is sand nigger?
Sand nigger is a noun.
How do you pronounce sand nigger?
Sand nigger is pronounced /ˈsænd ˌnɪɡəɹ/ (US).
What is the plural of sand nigger?
The plural of sand nigger is sand niggers.

Words near sand nigger in the dictionary

  1. sand monkeys
  2. sand motor
  3. sand motors
  4. sand mouse
  5. sand myrtle
  6. sand nigger
  7. sand niggers
  8. sand off
  9. sand olive
  10. sand olives
  11. sand painting

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sand nigger (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-sand nigger.ogg.

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