A word history · 27 July 2026
bigotry /ˈbɪɡətri/ — n.
Not "the experts disagree." Not "it's contested." The Oxford English Dictionary, Etymonline, the 1913 Webster's and an 1897 Larousse all say the same thing: origin unknown. Every confident story you have heard about this word is overreaching — and the most famous one was dismissed by the OED as "absurdly incongruous with facts."
Four things are true at once, and most accounts of this word get at least two of them wrong.
One: the origin is genuinely unknown, and the "by God" story is two different claims wearing one coat — a respectable scholarly proposal, and a piece of folklore invented after the fact.
Two: for its first three centuries in English the word had nothing to do with race. It meant a religious hypocrite. In 1653 and 1664 it appears alongside "hypocrite" and "Sotts," not alongside anything like "racist."
Three: the modern group-hatred sense didn't replace the old one. It was added on top. In the Google Books corpus, "racial bigotry" never once overtakes "religious bigotry" in any year between 1800 and 2019.
Four: the word is far rarer today than in the nineteenth century. It peaked in 1827 and is currently running at about 0.69× its 1900 rate.
Six accounts are in circulation. Only one is a consensus, and it is the one that declines to answer. Verified against Etymonline, Webster's 1913, Wiktionary and Anatoly Liberman's published columns.
French bigot is attested from the 12th century and is, in Etymonline's flat phrasing, "of unknown origin." Webster's 1913: "Of unknown origin." The 1897 Larousse: origine douteuse.
The position of every major reference workOld French bigot was a derogatory nickname for Normans, possibly from their habitual Germanic oath. There is real supporting material: the surnames Bigott and Bygott are attested in Normandy and England from the 11th century, and there are genuine parallels — the English were called goddamns in Joan of Arc's France. But the sense development is hard to explain: an ethnic slur for Normans does not obviously become a word for an over-pious hypocrite.
Live proposal — Dauzat, CNRTL; "not universally accepted"The famous version: the Norman leader Rollo refused to kiss King Charles the Simple's foot, said "Nese bi god," and the taunt stuck. Anatoly Liberman: "That Rollo should have offended the king and said something in English to him is beyond belief" — "a folk etymological guess invented in retrospect."
OED 2nd ed. dismissed a version of it as "absurdly incongruous with facts"The earliest French use is as the name of a people in southern Gaul, which prompted a derivation from the Visigoths. Now "considered doubtful on phonetic grounds" — and a memory of the Goths would scarcely have lingered that long.
Etymonline; LibermanEtymonline's verdict is a small masterpiece of dryness: the theory has "been proposed as the origin of the word, but not explained, so the chief virtue of that theory is the lack of evidence against it." It also has a problem — Spanish bigote entered English separately in 1622, as its own word with its own dictionary entry.
Unexplained; weakened by the separate 1622 borrowingGrammont's proposal, championed by Liberman: a shortening of "inhabitant of Albi," tying the word to the Cathar heresy, which flourished "exactly where and when the word bigot seems to have turned up for the first time." He places it in a pattern: bugger from "Bulgarian," beggar from "Beguine."
Adopted by neither the OED nor EtymonlineDates, as opposed to stories about dates.
| Form | First recorded | Source |
|---|---|---|
| English bigot | 1598 | OED (rev. 2008), in Thomas Speght |
| English bigotry | 1616 | OED (rev. 2008), in P. Hay |
| English bigoted | 1660 | OED |
| French bigot | 12th c. | Etymonline; Wiktionary |
| bigote "mustache" | 1622 | OED — a separate borrowing |
Cross-checking those dates against Etymonline turns up a real conflict. The OED's 2008 revision gives 1616 for bigotry. Etymonline gives the 1670s — a gap of about 55 years.
Both are honestly reported by their sources. OED revisions routinely push first attestations earlier as more text is digitised, and Etymonline reflects older scholarship. It is a useful reminder that even a sourced date is a snapshot of what has been found so far, not a fact about the world. Inference
Read what the word is standing next to.
"He is no bigot or hypocrite, he is not torn and divided betwixt reality and appearance, no wretch of a rugged and peevish disposition, but honest, jovial, resolute, and a good fellow."
Urquhart, translating Rabelais, 1653
"Thus one part of their Church becomes Sotts and Bigots; and the other… become a company of profane Atheists and clancular Deriders of all Religion."
Henry More, A Modest Enquiry Into the Mystery of Iniquity, 1664
In both, bigot keeps company with hypocrite and Sotts. The accusation is false or stupefied piety. The earliest English sense was specifically a religious hypocrite — and, per Etymonline, especially a female one.
Same publisher, 113 years apart. Verified from the 1913 text and the current entry.
"A person who is intolerant of opinions which conflict with his own, as in politics or morals."
Race, ethnicity and group membership appear nowhere in the 1913 entries for bigot, bigoted or bigotry. The axis is opinion.
"especially: one who strongly and unfairly dislikes or feels hatred toward others based on their group membership."
Wiktionary now lists the group-intolerance sense first and the religious sense second, marked obsolete. The 1913 Webster's ordered them the other way round. Between them they record the inversion directly.
bigotry per million words, 1800–2019, Google Books English corpus. Verified — curve drawn from the fetched series.
The intuitive story is that "bigotry" shifted from religion to race. Half of that is right and half is wrong.
"Racial bigotry" is effectively nonexistent before the twentieth century, first clearing 0.001 per million in 1917. It rises steadily and peaks in 1999.
But it never overtakes "religious bigotry" — not in any year from 1800 to 2019. I checked every year independently. It tops out at roughly half the religious collocation's frequency. The modern sense broadened the word; it did not replace what was already there. Verified
And where it sends you is currently inconsistent.
There was an article. Created as Bigot on 4 June 2003, renamed in
2005, it accumulated 1,663 revisions from 1,024 editors before being
turned into a redirect in March 2017. There was never a deletion discussion — it
was a proposed deletion that simply stuck. A quarter of all its revisions were reverts;
nearly half came from unregistered editors.
One editor stated the underlying worry plainly, and the protection log shows he was right — the page had already been protected in 2014 for violations of the policy on biographies of living people:
"Wikipedia is not a dictionary, and the differences are minor enough that any page on bigotry will end up being a list of people described as bigots."
Menaechmi, August 2017
Bigoted. Restored to this target in October 2023.
Bigots. Still pointing here from the July 2022 change.
On 29 July 2022 one editor repointed all four titles to Discrimination within
eight minutes. Fourteen months later another editor reverted only
Bigotry. The other two were never changed back.
So the abstract noun and the adjective go to one article; the noun for the person goes to a different one. Nothing in the record suggests anyone noticed. Verified by live query, 27 July 2026
The substance of that 2022 edit — treating bigotry as a synonym for discrimination — is exactly what editors had rejected in 2010: "Bigotry is an attitude which can lead to discrimination… The two are completely different." The same disagreement recurred twelve years later with no participants in common.
The Prejudice article contains zero occurrences of "bigot"
or "bigotry" in its prose — I checked the full text. Meanwhile the
Bigotry redirect draws roughly 25,000–35,000 readers a
year.
Tens of thousands of people a year look up a word and land on an article that does not contain it. Verified
Sources: the OED entries for bigot and bigotry (revised 2008), Etymonline, the 1913 Webster's Revised Unabridged (public domain, via Project Gutenberg), current Merriam-Webster and Wiktionary, Anatoly Liberman's published columns on the word, Google Books Ngrams, and the full public revision history of the Wikipedia page and its talk archives.
The headline claims were then re-checked independently against live sources before publication: the Ngrams series was re-fetched and the peak, trough, ratio and the racial-vs-religious comparison recomputed from scratch; the revision count and first revision were re-paginated; all four redirect targets were re-queried; and the Prejudice article text was searched directly. Every figure matched. The Etymonline cross-check is what surfaced the 1616-vs-1670s conflict noted above.