half-caste

American  

[haf-kast, hahf-kahst] / ˈhæfˌkæst, ˈhɑfˌkɑst /

noun

1. a contemptuous term used to refer to a person of mixed racial or ethnic descent.

2. a contemptuous term used to refer to a person of mixed European and Hindu or European and Muslim parentage.

3. a contemptuous term used to refer to a person descended from parents of two different social strata.

---

adjective

1. of or relating to a half-caste.

half-caste British  

noun

1. a person having parents of different races, esp the offspring of a European and an Indian

---

adjective

1. of, relating to, or designating such a person

Etymology

Origin of half-caste

First recorded in 1785–95

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

half-caste

“Like the other half-caste children,” Gyasi writes, “he could not fully claim either half of himself, neither his father’s whiteness nor his mother’s blackness. Neither England nor the Gold Coast.”

From Washington Post ● Jun. 13, 2016

Unlike the British, early Dutch colonizers were not discouraged from marrying native women and no social ostracism came to them or their half-caste children.

From Time Magazine Archive

The clergy of the sects and denominations might be characterized as a half-caste priesthood, or a priesthood in process of becoming or of reconstitution.

From Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen

Now he saw at a flash why the half-caste had carried him off, and pursued him so closely and fiercely, yet without doing him the least harm.

From Jack Haydon's Quest by John Jellicoe

Before I left the fort, I married several of the Company's servants, who had been living with, and had families by, Indian or half-caste women, and baptized their children.

From The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America and Frequent Excursions Among the North-West American Indians, In the Years 1820, 1821, 1822, 1823. by John West