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Gypsy

nounproper nounadjectivecommon in dialogue

  • United States//ˈd͡ʒɪp.si//

A member of the Romani people, or one of the sub-groups (Roma, Sinti, Romanichal, etc).

noun

  1. 1

    A member of the Romani people, or one of the sub-groups (Roma, Sinti, Romanichal, etc).

  2. 2

    A member of other nomadic peoples, not only of the Romani people; a traveller. Alternative spelling of gypsy.

Etymology

A clipping of Gyptian (in Early Modern English roughly /ˈd͡ʒɪp.sɪ.æn/), itself an apheretic form of Egyptian, from Middle English Egipcian (“Egyptian”) (rarely Gypcian), from Old French egyptien, from Latin aegyptianus, from aegyptius (“Egypt”), because when Roma first appeared in England in the sixteenth century, they were wrongly believed to have come from Egypt. The Albanian evgjit, Greek γύφτος (gýftos), Italian gitano, Spanish gitano and Turkish Kıpti have the same origin. Doublet of Egyptian and Copt. The other major categories of words for the Roma are cognates of Rom (words related to the Romani people's autonyms) and cognates of tzigane (words derived from Greek); see those entries for more information.

proper noun

  1. 1

    rareThe language Romani.

  2. 2

    A female given name.

    "Why, good afternoon, Miss Gypsy," said Sir Simms; "I'm surprised to see you such a warm day — very much surprised. But you always were a remarkable young lady ..."

adjective

  1. 1

    Of or belonging to the Romani people or one of it sub-groups (Roma, Sinti, Romanichel, etc).

Forms

plural
Gypsies
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).