Anglo is a prefix indicating a relation to the Angles, England, the English people, or the English language, such as in the term "Anglo-Saxon language". It is often used alone, somewhat loosely, to refer to people of British Isles descent in The Americas, New Zealand, Australia and Southern Africa. It is also used, both in English-speaking and non-English-speaking countries, to refer to Anglophone people of other European origins.
Anglo is a Late Latin prefix used to denote English- in conjunction with another toponym or demonym. The word is derived from Anglia, the Latin name for England, and still the modern name of its eastern region. Anglia and England both mean Land of the Angles, a Germanic people originating in the north German peninsula of Angeln.
It is also often used to refer to 'British' in historical and other contexts after the Acts of Union 1707, for example such as in the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824, where in later years agreement was between the British government and the Dutch, not an English government. Typical examples of this use are also shown below, where non-English people from the British Isles are classified as being English.
Anglo is not an easily defined term. For traditionalists, there are linguistic problems with using the word as an adjective or noun on its own. For example, the purpose of the -o ending is to enable the formation of a compound term (for example Anglo-Saxon meaning of Angle and Saxon origin), so there is only an apparent parallelism between, for example, Latino and Anglo. However, a semantic change has taken place in many English-speaking regions so that in informal usage the meanings listed below are common.