Wop

 ( Pejorative Terms For European People ) 

Wop is a pejorative term for Italian people or people of Italian descent.Embury, Stuart P. (2006). "Chapter One: The Early Years". The Art and Life of Luigi Lucioni. Embury Publishing Company. pp. 1-4.

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Etymology The Merriam-Webster dictionary states wop's first known use was in the United States in 1908, and that it originates from the Southern Italian dialectal term guappo, roughly meaning "dandy", or "swaggering", derived from the Spanish term guapo, meaning "good-looking", "dandy", from Latin vappa for "sour wine", also "worthless fellow". Wop. Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved on 2018-07-30. Wop. Merriam-webster.com. Retrieved on 2015-10-11. Wop. Dictionary.reference.com. Retrieved on 2015-10-11.

In Neapolitan and other Southern Italo-Romance varieties, guappo is pronounced roughly as wahp-po.

(2025). 9780813341408, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. . ISBN 9780813341408

As word-final vowels in Southern Italian varieties are often realized as /ə/, guappo would often sound closer to wahpp to anglophones. Guappo historically refers to a type of flashy, boisterous, swaggering, dandy-like man. The word eventually became associated with members of the Camorra and has often been used in the Naples area as a friendly or humorous term of address among men. Quando il guappo non era camorrista, Il Denaro Nr. 159, August 26, 2006 The word likely transformed into the slur "wop" following the arrival of Italian diaspora. The term guappo was especially used by older Italian immigrant males to refer to the younger Italian male immigrants arriving in America.

(2025). 9781843100331, Jessica Kingsley Publishers. . ISBN 9781843100331

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False etymologies

One false etymology or backronym of wop is that it is an acronym for "without passport" or "without papers", implying that Italian immigrants entered the U.S. as undocumented or illegal immigrants.

(2025). 9780812978100, Random House. . ISBN 9780812978100

The term has nothing to do with immigration documents, as these were not required by U.S. immigration officers until 1924, after the slur had already come into use in the United States.

Another backronym is that wop stands for "working on pavement", based on a stereotype that Italian immigrants and Italian-American men typically do manual labor such as road-building.

(2025). 9780275987640, Greenwood Publishing Group. . ISBN 9780275987640

(2025). 9780820344799, University of Georgia Press. . ISBN 9780820344799

Turning acronyms into words did not become common practice until after World War II, accelerating along with the growth of the US space-program and the Cold War. The first use of wop significantly predates that period.

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See also

• List of ethnic slurs
• Anti-Italianism

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External links

Categories: Pejorative Terms For European People, Anti-italian Sentiment, American Slang, English Words, Ethnic And Religious Slurs

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