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African-American

nounadjectiveattested in dialogue

  • //ˈæ.fɹɪ.kən əˈmɛɹ.ɪ.kən//

A member of an ethnic group consisting of Americans of black African (particularly Niger-Congo) descent.

noun

  1. 1

    A member of an ethnic group consisting of Americans of black African (particularly Niger-Congo) descent.

  2. 2

    Any black American person; by extension, any black person.

Etymology

Patterned on forms such as Irish-American, popularized by Jesse Jackson and in common use since the late 1980s.

adjective

  1. 1

    Of a person, pertaining to the African-American ethnicity.

    The rioters overshadowed the message of peaceful protesters on prior days: They had called for justice for Gray, a 25-year-old African-American man who died from spinal injuries after police arrested him this month.

  2. 2

    Black.

  3. 3

    Of or pertaining to the culture of African-American people.

    African-American music

Forms

plural
African-Americans
comparative
more African-American
superlative
most African-American
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).