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Crossword clues for piccaninny

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
piccaninny

also pickaninny, 1650s, from West Indies patois, formed as a diminutive from Spanish pequeño or Portuguese pequeno "little, small," of uncertain origin, related to French petit (see petit (adj.)). As late as 1836 applied affectionately to any small child or baby, regardless of race.

Wiktionary
piccaninny

n. (alternative form of pickaninny English)

WordNet
piccaninny

n. (offensive) a Black child [syn: pickaninny, picaninny]

Wikipedia
Piccaninny

Piccaninny, with variant spellings Pickaninny, Piccaninnie, Picaninny and Pickaninnie, may refer to:

  • Pickaninny, term used for black children
  • Piccaninny crater, impact structure in Western Australia
  • Piccaninny Plains Sanctuary, nature reserve in Queensland, Australia
  • Piccaninnie Ponds Conservation Park, South Australia
  • The Piccaninny, mountain in the Grampians National Park, Victoria, Australia
  • The tribe of Native Americans in the children's novel Peter and Wendy.

Usage examples of "piccaninny".

Once he stood enraptured at the sight of a white Colonial-style mansion from which a white-clad girl had floated down the steps, a rose basket on her arm, a piccaninny in attendance.

Swanki, the Piccaninny girl, and Tiki, the Piccaninny boy, were up in a karaka tree eating the pulp of the ripe berries.

When I was young I was told I would die if I ate the karaka berries, but I suppose Piccaninny tummies are different.

The Piccaninnies who had lived in that part of the bush could never again return to the cool green shades of the forest, never slide down a fern leaf, or swing on the branches, or pick puriri berries, or pelt the morepork in the daytime.

Up till now the vaudevillians had been white, doing their minstrel shows and piccaninny turns in blackface, but now that there was a colored migration to the Sydney coalfield, genuine colored artists started coming up from the States.

A tipsy, disorderly, vindictive debil-debil it was, that made the boldest piccaninny shriek with dismay.

The Piccaninnies, on their part, trusted implicitly to his honour, and their whole action of the night stands out in marked contrast to his.

The quaking piccaninnies cringed with fear as they watched him working up his malignant feelings into the most awful imps--imps which threatened violence to their souls.

In the fulness of his vanity and wit, Wylo began to make gratuitous fun of Yan-coo, who fretted and fumed and terrified the piccaninnies with still more hideous debils-debils.

Wylo with a tiny spear of grass knocked the head of the atrocious debil-debil off, and the piccaninnies changed shrieks for smiles.

He actually modelled the grossest of debils-debils for the piccaninnies and impaled all the vital parts with grass darts, while the piccaninnies broke into open jeers at Yan-coo, for the spell of the debil-debil had been destroyed.

I think we might have had the whole establishment, piccaninnies included.

Nor did he approve of this same young woman spending most of her waking hours either in study, or in the slums and shanty towns that had sprung up on the Cape Flats, dishing out to snot-nosed piccaninnies free soup the ingredients of which she had helped obtain by standing on street corners with a beggar's box.

The great herds of game that once had covered the open grassland to the full range of the eye were long gone, and now small scrub cattle, multi-coloured and scrawny, grazed in mindless bovine herds tended by almost naked black piccaninnies who paused to watch Mark pedalling by, and greeted him with solemnity which turned to wideeyed pleasure when he returned the greeting in their own language.