Word.ws English Dictionary

whiteboy

whiteboy noun: a man or boy who is highly favoured; a pet, a darling. Also the alternative form of Whiteboy.

Noun (1)

whiteboy (countable and uncountable, plural whiteboys)

  1. (archaic) A man or boy who is highly favoured; a pet, a darling.
    • Were war at the gates, I should be one of her white boys.1821 January 8, [Walter Scott], Kenilworth; a Romance. […], volume II, Edinburgh: […] Archibald Constable and Co.; and John Ballantyne, […]; London: Hurst, Robinson, and Co., →OCLC
  2. (derogatory, sometimes, chiefly African-American) A Caucasian male.
    • The words of the whiteboy crept into his mind as he got ready to crawl out of bed—and he once again realized Cassandra hardly ever showered.2006, Eminemsrevenge, Jew Girl, page 164
    • whiteboy still more than anything else this betrays me.2011, Kevin Coval, Patricia Smith, L-vis Lives!: Racemusic Poems, link
  3. (slang, uncountable) Heroin.
    • Coordinate term: whitegirl (“cocaine”)

Noun (2) capitalized: Whiteboy

Whiteboy (plural Whiteboys)

  1. A member of the Whiteboys, a secret Irish agrarian organization in 18th-century Ireland, using violent tactics to defend tenant farmers' land rights for subsistence farming.

Also used as

whiteboy is also the alternative form of Whiteboy.

Forms of whiteboy

pluralwhiteboys
alternative formwhite boy
pluralWhiteboys

Origin of whiteboy

From white + boy.

From white + boy, from the white smocks the members wore in their nightly raids.

Words formed from whiteboy

Questions about whiteboy

What does whiteboy mean?
Whiteboy means a man or boy who is highly favoured; a pet, a darling.
What part of speech is whiteboy?
Whiteboy is a noun.
What is the plural of whiteboy?
The plural of whiteboy is whiteboys.

Words near whiteboy in the dictionary

  1. whiteblow
  2. whiteboard
  3. whiteboarding
  4. whiteboards
  5. whitebook
  6. whiteboy
  7. Whiteboyism
  8. whiteboys
  9. whitebread
  10. whitebreads
  11. whitebream

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: whiteboy (page history and authors); Whiteboy (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-au-whiteboy.ogg.

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