Wog - British English

British English

Wog in the UK is usually regarded as a racially offensive slang word referring to a dark-skinned or olive-skinned person from Africa or Asia. It can be applied to any darker-skinned people, but is used generally to refer to peoples of the East Indies and India, as well as immigrants from the Middle-East and Mediterranean. Most dictionaries refer to the word as derogatory and offensive.

The origin of the term may be unknown, but it was first noted by lexicographer F.C. Bowen, who recorded it in 1929 in his Sea slang: a dictionary of the old-timers’ expressions and epithets, where he defines wogs as "lower class Babu shipping clerks on the Indian coast." Unsupported folk etymology has long explained it as being an acronym for "Westernised (or "Wily") Oriental Gentlemen" used by the British in India and Pakistan, referring to the educated indigenous populace. Many dictionaries say "wog" derives from the golliwog, a blackface minstrel doll character from a children's book published in 1895, or from pollywog, a maritime term for someone who has not crossed the equator.

The saying "The wogs begin at Calais" (implying that everyone who is not British is a wog) appears to date from the First World War, but was popularised by George Wigg, Labour MP for Dudley, in 1949 when in a parliamentary debate concerning the Burmese, Wigg shouted at the Conservative benches, "The Honourable Gentleman and his friends think they are all 'wogs'. Indeed, the Right Honourable Member for Woodford thinks that the 'wogs' begin at Calais."