Gweilo

noun, slang

noun, slang ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A white person in China, (particularly) a man; a ‘foreign devil’. colloquial, ethnic, slur

    "She had ruffled the bed and laid a frilly nightdress on the floor because so far as the block was concerned Phoebe was the half-kwailo bastard who whored with the fat foreign devil."

Synonyms

All synonyms
caucasiancolonizercrackergweipohonkyice monkey

Example

More examples

"I am Chinese and Tom is a gweilo."

Etymology

From Cantonese 鬼佬 (gwai² lou²), from 鬼 (gwai², “ghost”) + 佬 (lou², “guy, man”).

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.