This issue has come up before, at least a couple of times.
In 2013, MK made the same comparison of
negro and
nigger, and suggested that
negro should be classed as a common word, since everybody would know it.
In 2015, Tom made the comparison between, on the one hand,
dago and
nigger (classed as common) and
negro (classed as rare). He asked why the first two were not rare.
Before going any further I have to point out, for the benefit of anyone who stumbles on this thread and hasn't seen previous discussions here about offensive words in the Chihuahua puzzle, that words like
nigger and
dago can be played in the puzzle purely because they are words in the English language, found in standard dictionaries and used in speech and writing. I certainly don't condone the use of such words as racist terms of abuse. In the 2015 discussion, linked above, a non-amos looked forward to the day when such objectionable words would be rare. I'm sure we all do.
I've concluded that
negro should remain a rare word, given that it has normally been written with a capital
N for several decades, and some players, not knowing the word's history outlined above, would assume it's not a playable word at all.
As regards
nigger, American corpus data shows the word having peak usage in the Civil War decade of the 1860s, with a massive 42.69 occurrences per million words of text. This is about as common as the word
apple in contemporary texts. After smaller peaks in the 1930s and 1960s, the word's frequency began a steady decline to a little above 1 word per million. One could debate whether articles that don't mention the word itself, but allude to it as the "N-word" are still evidence of the word's familiarity.
But probably this is all beside the point. The fact is, like it or not, we all know the word, so by our definition of a common word,
nigger is one.
Incidentally, the usage frequency of the word is not necessarily an index of the strength of racism in any given year. Many of the recent uses of the word are in italics (as in this post) or in quotes. That is, the word is being discussed, but it is not being used. And most of the occurrences of the word are in fiction, in passages of dialogue. These novels are probably aiming in many cases to convey an anti-racist message.
The word
dago, mentioned above, is much less often used these days, and I think there could be a good case for making it rare, but I'll look into that another time.
