quadroon

Alteration of Spanish cuarterón (“offspring of European and mestizo”), from cuarto (“fourth”), from Latin quartus (“fourth”)

quadroon (plural quadroons)

1. (dated) A person of three-fourths Caucasian descent and one fourth African descent.
   • 1868, Alcott, Louisa May, Little Women, ch. 47:

     There were slow boys and bashful boys, feeble boys and riotous boys, boys that lisped and boys that stuttered, one or two lame ones, and a merry little quadroon, who could not be taken in elsewhere, but who was welcome to the ‘Bhaer-garten’, though some people predicted that his admission would ruin the school.

2. (Australia, dated) A person of three-quarters Aboriginal descent and one quarter Caucasian descent; a person of one quarter Aboriginal descent.
   • 1938, Xavier Herbert, Capricornia, Chapter V, p. 63; Chapter VIII, p. 120

     Diana was a black quadroon, her father being a blackfellow.

     He was the father of four quadroons who were regarded as half-castes because the lighter part of their mother's blood was Asiatic, and he was only too well aware of what their future would be should he desert them.

• quarter-caste

quadroon (not comparable)

1. (dated) Having three-fourths Caucasian descent and one-fourth African descent.
   • 1842, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Quadroon Girl”:

     Before them, with her face upraised,

     In timid attitude,

     Like one half curious, half amazed,

     A Quadroon maiden stood.

   • 1852, Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom's Cabin, ch. XVII:

     "What need you getting drunk, then, and cutting up, Prue?" said a spruce quadroon chambermaid, dangling, as she spoke, a pair of coral ear-drops.

   • 1855, Whitman, Walt, “Song of Myself”, in Leaves of Grass, book III:

     The quadroon girl is sold at the auction-stand, the drunkard nods by the bar-room stove, […]

• octoroon