ethnonym

The trail begins in classical Athens in the 5th century BCE with Greek ethnikos and ethnos, meaning a people or nation. That base formed terms for grouping humans by shared origin or culture. Greek writers used ethnos for both insiders and outsiders, and the word was not a slur by itself. The semantic core was simply "a people."

Latin writers in the 1st century BCE adopted Greek ethnos as ethnos in learned contexts. The term survived in scholarly Latin as a label for peoples and nations. By the 16th century, Renaissance scholars revived Greek compounds in European languages. The shape ethnonym arose as a learned formation, modeled on Greek onoma "name."

French and German philologists of the 18th and 19th centuries used ethnonym in technical catalogs of peoples. English followed in the late 19th century, with ethnonym printed in academic journals by the 1890s. The word kept a narrow, descriptive sense rather than a political one. It stayed tethered to linguistic and anthropological classification.

Modern English uses ethnonym for the name a people uses for itself or others use for it. The term can distinguish endonyms from exonyms, but it does not judge which is correct. It is now common in anthropology, history, and sociolinguistics. The oldest core meaning still holds: a people's name.