Hottentot
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Forms: form: Hottentots
Etymology: Borrowed from Dutch Hottentot, its first known use in Dutch being in the 1650s. The third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary concluded in 2008 that hottentot came into English in the seventeenth century. But it finds that no definitive etymology of Dutch hottentot can so far be given:
A very large number of different etymologies for the name have been suggested ... The most frequently repeated suggestion ... is that the word was a spec. use of a formally identical Dutch word meaning ‘stammerer, stutterer’, which came to be applied to the Khoekhoe and San people on account of the clicks characteristic of their languages. However, evidence for the earlier general use appears to be lacking. Another frequent suggestion is that the people were so named after one or more words which early European visitors to southern Africa heard in chants accompanying dances of the Khoekhoe or San ... but the alleged chant is rendered in different ways in different 17th-cent. sources, and some of the accounts may be based on hearsay rather than first-hand knowledge.
It does seem clear, however, that hottentot was an exonym, that is, not the Khoikhoi's own name for themselves but rather a foreign term applied to them.
Senses: examples: text: 1798-1801, Lady Ann Barnard, Letters and Journals
I was told that the Hottentots were uncommonly ugly and disgusting, but I do not think them so bad. Their features are small and their cheekbones immense, but they have a kind expression and countenance.
text: They were called "Bushmen" because they led a nomadic life based on hunting and gathering in bushveld. The first written appearance of the Khoisan people, represented by the Bushmen and the Hottentots, dates back to the tenth century.
ref: 2014, Jirō Tanaka, The Bushmen: A Half-century Chronicle of Transformations in Hunter-gatherer Life and Ecology, Apollo Books, →ISBN, page 2:
glosses: A member of the Khoekhoe group of peoples.
examples: text: The Hottentots (Khoisan peoples) once an independent nation but whose simple tribal system had disintegrated rapidly as they were relentlessly displaced from their traditional grazing grounds and driven deep into the still uninhabited interior […]
ref: 1978, Patricia Storrar, Portrait of Plettenberg Bay:
text: The Hottentots (Khoisan) of either sex, young and old, who were in the boor's service, always choose to sleep in the fireplace.
ref: 2007, Frontiers:
text: The Dutch colonists in this frontier district, two years after an uprising of the Khoisan (“Hottentots”), were wary of the newly installed British regime at the Cape of Good Hope.
ref: 2012, Richard Elphick, The Equality of Believers: Protestant Missionaries and the Racial Politics of South Africa, University of Virginia Press, →ISBN:
text: First, in 1828, all legal disabilities on the free people of colour, particularly the Khoisan [Hottentots], were removed by Ordinance 50.
ref: 2014, Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930, Cornell University Press, →ISBN:
glosses: A member of the broader Khoisan group of peoples.
glosses: Any of several fish of the genus Pachymetopon, in the family Sparidae.
Synonyms: word: Khoekhoe
word: Khoikhoi
word: Khoi
Derived terms: word: Hottentot cherry
word: Hottentot fig
word: Hottentot teal
word: Hottentot apron
word: Hottentot bread
word: Hottentot cabbage
alt: Trachandra
word: Hottentot's cabbage
english: formerly Mesembryanthemum edulus
translation: formerly Mesembryanthemum edulus
taxonomic: Carpobrotus edulis
word: Hottentot's fig
word: Hottentot god
word: Hottentot's god
word: Hottentot's cherry
word: Hottentots Holland Mountains