| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000. |
| |
| bigot |
| |
| SYLLABICATION: | big·ot |
| PRONUNCIATION: |  b g  t |
| NOUN: | One who is strongly partial to one's own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ. | | ETYMOLOGY: | French, from Old French. | | WORD HISTORY: | Bigots may have more in common with God than one might think. Legend has it that Rollo, the first duke of Normandy, refused to kiss the foot of the French king Charles III, uttering the phrase bi got, his borrowing of the assumed Old English equivalent of our expression by God. Although this story is almost surely apocryphal, it is true that bigot was used by the French as a term of abuse for the Normans, but not in a religious sense. Later, however, the word, or very possibly a homonym, was used abusively in French for the Beguines, members of a Roman Catholic lay sisterhood. From the 15th century on Old French bigot meant “an excessively devoted or hypocritical person.” Bigot is first recorded in English in 1598 with the sense “a superstitious hypocrite.”
| | |
| |
| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
|
|
