ethnicity

American  

[eth-nis-i-tee] / ɛθˈnɪs ɪ ti /

noun

ethnicities plural

1. an ethnic group; a social group that shares a common and distinctive culture, religion, language, or the like.

   Representatives of several ethnicities were present.

2. ethnic traits, background, allegiance, or association.

   The graph shows class enrollment by gender and ethnicity.

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ethnicity Cultural  

1. Identity with or membership in a particular racial, national, or cultural group and observance of that group's customs, beliefs, and language.

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Usage

race ²

Discover More

Many minority groups in the United States maintain strong ethnic identity; especially in cities, immigrants are often attracted to ethnic communities established by people from their own country, communities in which many traditional cultural features are maintained. (See melting pot.)

Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• ethnicities
  plural

Etymology

Origin of ethnicity

First recorded in 1765–75, for earlier sense; ethnic + -ity

Explanation

A person's ethnicity is their ethnic traits, classification, or association. If your ethnicity is Italian, you might speak Italian in the home and eat Italian food. Or you might simply refer to yourself as Italian and identify with your ethnicity in no other way. Usually, ethnicity is a collective noun, but in the singular, an ethnicity is a particular ethnic group. The adjective ethnic relates to large groups of people who have certain racial, cultural, religious, or other traits in common. In Middle English, ethnic meant heathen or pagan. The word is from Late Latin ethnicus, from Greek ethnikos "foreign," from ethnos "nation."

Example Sentences

And the census is still trying to figure out how to ask questions to sort out race, ethnicity and origins.

From Los Angeles Times • Jul. 2, 2026

Death rates fell for men and women, for every age group, and for most race and ethnicity categories.

From The Wall Street Journal • Jul. 2, 2026

Reaction to the attack, and the alleged attacker's ethnicity, prompted protests on Tuesday evening in many parts of Northern Ireland.

From BBC • Jun. 10, 2026

The second was a matched cohort of 30,528 women, pairing each GLP-1 user with a nonuser who shared similar characteristics, including age, race, ethnicity, BMI, breast density, and diabetes status.

From Science Daily • Jun. 6, 2026

With this body of files we could sift and sort through the population of the district by gender, race, ethnicity, party affiliation, occupation.

From "Native Speaker" by Chang-rae Lee