Lexicographer Noah Webster suggested the neger spelling in place of negro in his 1806 dictionary. An early occurrence of neger in American English dates from 1625 in Rhode Island. Later American English spellings, neger and neggar, prevailed in New York under the Dutch and in metropolitan Philadelphia's Moravian and Pennsylvania Dutch communities the African Burial Ground in New York City originally was known by the Dutch name Begraafplaats van de Neger (Cemetery of the Negro). In the colonial America of 1619, John Rolfe used negars in describing the African slaves shipped to the Virginia colony. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first derogatory usage of the term nigger was recorded two centuries later, in 1775. The earliest known published use of the term dates from 1574, in a work alluding to 'the Nigers of Aethiop, bearing witnes'.
In its original English-language usage, nigger (also spelled niger) was a word for a dark-skinned individual. Etymologically, negro, noir, nègre, and nigger ultimately derive from nigrum, the stem of the Latin niger ('black'). The variants neger and negar derive from various Romance words for 'black', including the Spanish and Portuguese word negro (black) and the now-pejorative French nègre.
