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The Collaborative International Dictionary
Semite

Semite \Sem"ite\, n. One belonging to the Semitic race. Also used adjectively.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Semite

1847, "a Jew, Arab, Assyrian, or Aramaean" (an apparently isolated use from 1797 refers to the Semitic language group), back-formation from Semitic or else from French Sémite (1845), from Modern Latin Semita, from Late Latin Sem "Shem," one of the three sons of Noah (Gen. x:21-30), regarded as the ancestor of the Semites (in old Bible-based anthropology), from Hebrew Shem. In modern sense said to have been first used by German historian August Schlözer in 1781.

Usage examples of "semite".

However, to return in thought to the past, of which our present is the continuation: the old Biblical ideal of offering a holocaust to Yahweh by massacring every living thing in a captured town or city was but the Hebrew version of a custom general to the early Semites: the Moabites, the Amorites, the Assyrians, and all.

Biblical ideal of offering a holocaust to Yahweh by massacring every living thing in a captured town or city was but the Hebrew version of a custom general to the early Semites: the Moabites, the Amorites, the Assyrians, and all.

Peru that all the languages of the Hamites, Semites, and Japhethites are varieties of one aboriginal speech.

The Sumerians had something the succeeding Hamites, Semites and Aryans lacked.

I wonder if they bequeathed that bald-headed anecdote to their successors, the railroad brakemen and conductors, and if these latter still persecute the helpless passenger with it until he concludes, as did many a tourist of other days, that the real grandeurs of the Pacific coast are not Yo Semite and the Big Trees, but Hank Monk and his adventure with Horace Greeley.

The Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Phoenicians, the Jews, the Arameans, the Chaldeans, all of them Semites, had been the rulers of western Asia for thirty or forty centuries.

Tacitus, the Roman historian, wrote that the Semites fell into venerating the ass because had it not been for wild asses, they never would have survived in the desert.