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In the colonial societies of the Americas and Australia, a quadroon or quarteron (in the United Kingdom, the term quarter-caste is used) was a person with one-quarter African/Aboriginal and three-quarters European peoples ancestry. Similar classifications were octoroon for one-eighth black (Latin root octo-, means "eight") and quintroon for one-sixteenth black.
Governments of the time sometimes incorporated the terms in law, defining rights and restrictions. The use of such terminology is a characteristic of hypodescent, which is the practice within a society of assigning children of mixed unions to the ethnic group which the dominant group perceives as being subordinate. The racial designations refer specifically to the number of full-blooded African or equivalent, emphasizing the quantitative least, with quadroon signifying that a person has one-quarter black ancestry.
Similarly, the Spanish cognate cuarterón is used to describe cuarterón de mulato or morisco (someone whose racial origin is three-quarters white and one-quarter black) and cuarterón de mestizo or castizo, (someone whose racial origin is three-quarters white and one-quarter Amerindian), especially in Caribbean South America.
The term mulatto was used to designate a person who was biracial, with one fully black parent and one fully white parent, or a person whose parents are both mulatto. (2008). 9781434473264, Wildside Press. ISBN 9781434473264 In some cases, it was used as a general term, for instance on U.S. census classifications, to refer to all persons of mixed race, without regard for proportion of ancestries. The only time a more specific classification was utilized was in the 1890 Census, which counted almost a million mulattoes (defined as to white), over 100,000 quadroons and slightly under 70,000 octaroons among 7.5 million Black people; however, the Census Bureau concluded from the experience that this kind of distinction is unreliable and "of little value" so it was abandoned.
The term octoroon referred to a person with one-eighth African/Aboriginal ancestry; Princeton University WordNet Search: octoroon that is, someone with family heritage equivalent to one biracial grandparent; in other words, one African great-grandparent and seven European great-grandparents. An example was Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. Octoroon was applied to a limited extent in Australia for those of one-eighth Aboriginal ancestry, as the government implemented assimilation policies on the Stolen Generations. The term mustee was also used to refer to a person with one-eighth African ancestry.
The term sacatra was used to refer to one who was seven-eighths black or African and one-eighth white or European (i.e. an individual with one black and one griffe parent, or one white great-grandparent).
The term mustefino refers to a person with one-sixteenth African ancestry. The terms quintroon or hexadecaroon were also used.
In the French Antilles, the following terms were usedFrédéric Regent, Esclavage, métissage et liberté, Grasset, 2004, p.14Gérard Etienne, François Soeler, La femme noire dans le discours littéraire haïtien: éléments d'anthroposémiologie, Balzac-Le Griot, 1998, p.27Regent Frédéric, « Structures familiales et stratégies matrimoniales des libres de couleur en Guadeloupe au XVIIIe siècle », Annales de démographie historique 2/2011 (n° 122), p. 69–98 during the 18th century:
| Black ancestry | Saint-Domingue | Guadeloupe/Martinique |
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| Mulâtre | ||
| Métis | ||
| Quarteron | ||
| Mamelouk | ||
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