What Does Gringo Mean?

Gringo is a Spanish word for a foreigner — usually an English speaker, and most often an American. Whether it's neutral, affectionate or insulting depends entirely on who says it, how, and where.

In much of Latin America it's an everyday descriptive word, used without any particular edge. In other contexts, or with the right tone, it's clearly derogatory. It is not a slur in the way some English words are, but it isn't always polite either.

How usage varies by country:

Brazil is the notable case — there, a visiting Argentinian is just as much a gringo as an American, because the word simply means "not from here".

Is it offensive? It sits somewhere between neutral and mildly rude, and context does all the work:

• Neutral: "There's a gringo restaurant on the corner" — simply meaning foreign or American-style.
• Affectionate: friends calling an American acquaintance el gringo as a nickname.
• Dismissive: used with a sneer to mark someone as an ignorant outsider.
• Self-applied: plenty of expats cheerfully call themselves gringos, which tells you it isn't inherently hostile.

A reasonable comparison in English is a word like "foreigner" or "Yank" — descriptive on its face, but capable of carrying attitude.

Where the word actually comes from. This is where most people are misled.

Gringo derives from griego, the Spanish word for "Greek". In Spanish, as in English, "it's all Greek to me" was an idiom for incomprehensible speech. Griego shifted to gringo and came to mean someone speaking an unintelligible foreign language — initially any foreigner, not Americans specifically.

The word is documented in Spanish dictionaries as early as the 1780s, in the Diccionario castellano of Esteban de Terreros y Pando, where it's defined as foreigners with accents that make their Spanish hard to understand.

The "green go home" story is false. The popular claim is that the word arose during the Mexican–American War, when locals shouted "green, go home!" at American soldiers in green uniforms. It's a satisfying story and it's completely wrong, for two straightforward reasons:

1. The word is documented decades before that war, which began in 1846.
2. US Army uniforms of that period were blue, not green.

Variants of the myth attribute it to the song "Green Grow the Lilacs" supposedly sung by American troops. That's equally unsupported. Folk etymologies like this are common precisely because they're more memorable than the real answer.

Related words:

• Gabacho — in Mexico, a sharper term for an American; in Spain, historically a Frenchman
• Yanqui — Yankee, an American, often used politically
• Extranjero — the plain, entirely neutral word for foreigner
• Guiri — Spain's equivalent, for a foreign tourist, usually northern European

Grammar: gringo is masculine, gringa feminine, and the plurals are gringos and gringas. As with Spanish generally, a mixed group takes the masculine plural.

If you're travelling and someone calls you a gringo, it's most likely descriptive rather than hostile. Read the tone rather than the word. And if you'd rather not be called it, extranjero is the neutral term to offer instead.