ABSTRACT
Although the word itself is surprisingly recent, being a modern coinage recorded from about 1909 based on the classical Greek roots xenos, “a stranger,” and phobos, “fear,” the attitudes it describes can be traced historically to time immemorial and have become an obvious feature of many modern societies. The entries for aliens, ethnic insults, and nicknames trace the causes, social dynamics, and verbal consequences of these attitudes. The word-field, which is dismayingly large, can be divided into General and Specific terms, and is set out in the entry for ethnic insults. Arranged historically, it shows that the motivations behind xenophobia are originally those of religious and martial rivalry, then racist animosity. Indeed the modern sense of xenophobia is closer to “hatred of foreigners.”
