The Real Origin of the Word “Gringo”

If there is one etymology everybody “knows”, it's the one for the word gringo. The story usually goes like this: during the Mexican–American War, back in 1846, the American soldiers wore green uniforms, and the Mexicans would shout at them “Green, go home!”. Repeated often enough, the two little words fused into one: green-go, gringo. Neat, round, and easy to remember.

There are variants for every taste. In one, the soldiers marched singing a popular song that began “Green grow the lilacs”, and the Mexicans nicknamed them after the chorus. In another, the battalions were organized by colors and the green one kept hearing “Green, go!”. They all share the same charm… and the same problem: they are chronologically impossible.

The problem: the dates don't add up

It turns out the word “gringo” appears in print in Spain in the 18th century, decades before that war was even conceivable. The Jesuit Esteban de Terreros y Pando, who compiled his monumental Diccionario castellano con las voces de ciencias y artes in the mid-1700s (published between 1786 and 1788), recorded the word with this delightful definition:

“In Málaga they call gringos the foreigners who have a certain kind of accent that keeps them from speaking Castilian easily and naturally; and in Madrid they give the same name, particularly, to the Irish.”

In other words: sixty years before the Mexican–American War (1846–1848), people in Málaga and Madrid were already calling “gringo” any foreigner who spoke tangled Spanish. And if the chronology weren't enough, one extra detail finishes the legend off: the American army uniforms of that era were blue, not green.

The real story: speaking Greek

The explanation accepted by etymologists —starting with Joan Corominas, author of the standard etymological dictionary of Spanish— is much older and, to my taste, much prettier. “Gringo” is a deformation of “griego”: Greek.

Since the Middle Ages, Greek has been the universal symbol of the incomprehensible. When medieval copyists ran into a Greek passage they couldn't read, they would note in the margin: Graecum est, non legitur —“it is Greek, it cannot be read”. The idea stuck all over Europe: English still says “It's all Greek to me”, an expression Shakespeare was already using in Julius Caesar. Spanish did exactly the same: hablar en griego, “to speak Greek”, meant to speak in a way nobody could understand.

So the foreigner with impenetrable speech was said to be “speaking Greek”, and popular usage gradually sanded “griego” down into “gringo”. It wasn't a slur against any particular nationality: it simply meant the one who talks funny.

The journey to America

The word crossed the Atlantic with the Spaniards and, like any good traveler, adapted to each port. In 19th-century Argentina and Uruguay, the “gringo” was the Italian immigrant. In Chile, Peru and Bolivia it was applied to the English and the Germans. In Mexico, Central America and my own Ecuador, it ended up specializing in the neighbor from the north —and, by extension, any fair-haired or light-skinned foreigner.

By the time the United States soldiers set foot in Mexico in 1846, the word had been waiting for them for generations. The shouts of war didn't invent it; the war merely gave it its most famous customer.

The green go home legend is charming, and it fits so well that it almost hurts to take it apart. But as we already saw with cocolón, which does not come from “cook too long”, and with Chipipe, which does not come from “shit pipe”, words almost always have longer and more interesting biographies than the urban legend of the day. Beware of any etymology that sounds too perfect.

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Enjoy the stories behind words? Continue with the origin of the word “ostracism” and the origin of the word “sybarite”, or browse the whole etymology series.