Nigger is an infamous word in current English, so much so that when
people are called upon to discuss it, they more often than not refer to it euphemistically as "the N-word." Its offensiveness is not
new—dictionaries have been noting it for more than 150 years—but it has grown more pronounced with the passage of
time. The word now ranks as almost certainly the most offensive and inflammatory racial slur in English, a term expressive of hatred and bigotry. Its self-referential uses by and among black
people are not
always intended or taken as offensive (although many object to those uses as
well), but its use by a person who is not black to refer to a black person can only be regarded as a deliberate expression of contemptuous racism. Its offensiveness has grown to such an extent in recent decades that sense 3 is now rarely used and is itself likely to be found offensive. The word'
s occurrence in older literary works by such writers as
Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain, and Charles Dickens can be shocking and upsetting to contemporary readers.