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There are many alternative ways to describe the people of the United Kingdom (UK), though the official designated nationality is British. The standard noun is Briton (see also demonym), but in colloquial usage this is often abbreviated informally to Brit. In practice, Britons are often referred to, according to their constituent nation, as English, Scottish, Welsh, or Northern Irish. Historically "British" implied a connection with the British Isles rather than with the United Kingdom and its predecessor states. Some other terms are humorous or derogatory slang, and used mainly by people from other countries, although British people themselves may use them in a self-deprecating way. Other terms are serious or tongue-in-cheek attempts to coin words as alternatives to the potentially ambiguous standard terms. British (English, Northern Irish, Scottish and Welsh combined) people may consider some if not all irreverent terms to be offensive, or in some cases even racist. Though there is often a misunderstanding on the British behalf when called Pommy by an Australian; as 'Pommy' is widely known as 'Prisoners of Her Majesty's Service'

Contents 1 Slang 1.1 Limey 1.2 Pommy 1.3 Sheepshagger 1.4 Rosbif/Rosbeef 1.5 Rooinek 1.6 Tea Bags 1.7 Britisher, Angrez, Angrej, Anggrit, Firang 1.8 John Bull 1.9 Tommy 1.10 Brit 1.11 Redcoat 2 Proposed alternatives 3 Other languages 4 References 5 See also

Limey is an old American and Canadian slang nickname for the British, originally referring to British sailors. The term is believed to derive from lime-juicer, referring to the Royal Navy and Merchant Navy practice of supplying lime juice to British sailors to improve the flavor of grog, which inadvertantly also prevented scurvy in the 19th century. The term is derogatory in the sense that the British would be allegedly more preoccupied with the savings of limes over lemons which were traditionally used to prevent scurvy. The term is thought to have originated in the Caribbean in the 1880s. A false etymology is that it is a derivative of "Corr-blimey" ("God blind me!").

The term Limey evolved into a verb "to lime" which means to hang out. The British sailors "Limeys" would hang out in the urban areas when off-duty and patronise the local prostitutes. This has been immortalized in the old calypso "Jean and Dinah" by the Mighty Sparrow in 1956.

The term pommy or pommie is commonly used by speakers of Australian English, New Zealand English, South African English and Afrikaans. It is often shortened to pom. The origin of this term is not confirmed and there are several persistent false etymologies, most being backronyms.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) strongly supports the theory that pom and pommy originated as contractions of "pomegranate", Australian rhyming slang for immigrant. The OED cites a well-known Australian weekly, The Bulletin, which on 14 November 1912 reported: "The other day a Pummy Grant (assisted immigrant) was handed a bridle and told to catch a horse."^[1]

A false etymology (or "backronym") common in both Australia and New Zealand is that pom originated as an acronym for "prisoner of (his/her) majesty" or "prisoner of mother England". Although many of the first British settlers in Australasia were convicts sentenced to transportation to Australia, there is no evidence for this. Some proponents of this theory claim that upon arrival in the country they would be given a uniform with "POHM" or "POME" emblazoned on the back, but there are no images or examples of these uniforms.

Other etymologies which are unsupported by evidence include:

• "prisoner of Millbank", after the area of London where prisoners were held prior to transportation;
• it is rhyming slang for tommy, international slang for a British soldier;
• an acronym for "Port of Melbourne". However, the term "pommy" was coined long before POM was used as acronym for the port.
• comes from "pomme", French for apple. The joke was that the pale British would turn red, like an apple, with sunburn when they landed in Australia.

Another backronym for POM relates to English immigrants who could not adjust to their new surroundings and were considered "prisoners of Mother England", in terms of attitude and culture.

Use of the word "pom" remains slightly contentious. Some British people living in Australasia find the term offensive and demeaning, others find it harmless and amusing. Attitudes to the use of the word have varied over the years; in the 1960s, slogans such as "bash a pom a day" were heard on New Zealand radio. The word has become so common that few Australians and New Zealanders see any reason to avoid using it, some even justifying the use of it as a "term of endearment". In December 2006, the Advertising Standards Board of Australia unanimously ruled that the word "pom" was a part of the Australian vernacular, and was largely used in a "playful or affectionate" sense. As a consequence, the board ruled that the word did not constitute a racial slur, and could be freely used in advertising. The Board was responding to a complaint filed by a community group called British People Against Racial Discrimination.^[2]

A term based on the perception that inhabitants of certain low population regions have a sexual predelictation for the sheep. Areas and countries such as Yorkshire, Wales, Australia and New Zealand have prominent sheep farming industries. In America a similar inference can be found with regards to the Amish. The Food and Agricultural Organization lists the UK, New Zealand and Australia 5th, 3rd and 2nd respectively^[3] in terms of indigenous sheep meat production, whilst New Zealand also has the highest proportion of sheep per capita outside of the Falklands. The Macc Lads sang (of the inhabitants of the 'hills' referring to the Yorkshire moors around Buxton) in "No Sheep 'til Buxton" (starting with a roar of "Sheepshaggers!"); "Sheep, everywhere, all the farmer's daughters have a sheepskin coat...they've got to wear a woolly if they want to pull a bloke". The song signs off with a hail of bleating. It is occasionally inferred that the reason for the attraction to the sheep is because of the poor quality of the women.

Famous sayings on the subject include "[Insert country/region] - where men are men, and the sheep are nervous". The suggestion that the best sex aid in these regions are velcro gloves, and that safe sex involves simply marking the sheep that kick in some manner.

There occurs a similar suggestion for the Scottish and Beef in reference to the Angus cattle farming, in particular referring to the spread of BSE having started in sheep, and the lonely Scots spreading it to the bovines.

In French the term rosbif refers to the idea that the British staple meat is roast beef, and that it is the only dish British cooks can prepare.^[4] During the Hundred Years War the French took to calling the English les goddams because of their frequent use of expletives.

In Portugal, the term bife (literally meaning steak, but sounding like beef) is used as a slang term to refer to British individuals. There is a feminine form, bifa, mainly used to refer to British female tourists.

In South Africa the term 'Pom' may also be used, while Afrikaans speakers use the term rooinek (literally 'red neck', on account of the sunburnt skin).

In Switzerland the term Tea Bags is used at least in the German speaking regions to refer to Britons. This is due to the perceived propensity of British people to drink tea.^{[citation needed]}

The term Britisher is still used in India, and to a lesser extent in the United States, but is largely obsolete elsewhere.

Angrez is of Arabic or Persian origin and is also sometimes used to refer to British people. It derives from the French Anglais. Among South Asians, Angrez often has the more general meaning of "white foreigner", although its more specific meaning is Englishman, with Angrezan for an English woman. This is mostly seen as an ethnic, rather than a territorial, term and applied specifically for people of Anglo-Saxons origin. So people of South Asian origin living in England do not usually refer to themselves as Angrez or Angrezan. Replacing the z with j is common practice especially amongst people from the Punjab region, hence it would be Angrej (masculine) and Angrejan (female). Urdu speakers retain the z always.

The word Firang is used in the same sense as Angrez. Firang is derived from the word 'Frank' and arose during the Crusades, when all invading Christians of the Latin Church came to be seen as Franks. Firang is more likely to have come from firangi meaning foreigner. It tends to refer to Europeans and the European diaspora. It could also stem from the colour of the skin, that is Fika Rang, ("light colour"), for lighter complexioned westerners. Such combinations of words occur frequently in Hindi and are called "sandhis". The word Ferengi, derived from Firang, is used in Star Trek to describe a race of rapacious alien traders. It could in this context be considered a somewhat obscure racial slur.

Punjabis use the term Englandi for any other citizen of England, including Asian British people, regardless of that person's ancestral ethnicity.

The word "Gora" is also commonly used amongst South Asians to refer to Britons. Though the term when literally translated means fair skinned, and would apply to all Caucasians it is more often associated with being a reference to Britons. The feminine of the term would be "Gori".

In Thai, the word anggrit (อังกฤษ) is used to described both the English in particular, and the British in general. The terms Scotland and Scot are also used to described the people and country of Scotland.

John Bull was originally a character created by John Arbuthnot in 1712 to satirise the Whig war party. Later in the 18th century, British satirical artists James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank contrasted the stout and healthy British cartoon character with scrawny French revolutionary sans-culottes Jacobins. In the 19th century the U.S. cartoonist Thomas Nast also drew the character. The character has tended to be more popular in, and to be more associated with, England than Scotland and Wales. In light of this, creator Arbuthnot provided John Bull with a sister, Peg, to represent the Scots.

The name Tommy for a soldier in the British Army is particularly associated with World War I. German soldiers used the word as general-purpose name, and would call out 'Tommy!' across no-man's land if they wished to speak to a British soldier (the British using 'Fritz!' for the opposite action). The French, and Commonwealth forces also used the name. Tommy is derived from Tommy Atkins which had been used as a generic name for a soldier for many years (and had been used as an example name on army registration forms). The precise origin is the subject of some debate, but it is known to have been used as early as 1743. Rudyard Kipling published the poem Tommy (part of the Barrack Room Ballads) in 1892 and in 1893 the music hall song Private Tommy Atkins was published with words by Henry Hamilton and music by S. Potter. In 1898 William McGonagall wrote Lines In Praise of Tommy Atkins. The rock-opera Tommy by The Who references the word in the title; the main character's father was a British airman who went missing in action during WWI.

Use of the term Brit seems to have become widespread in more recent times. The correct form is actually Briton, yet is rare in colloquial usage. The term 'Brit' was commonly used by nationalist Irish in Northern Ireland, during which time it acquired highly pejorative connotations.

The term Redcoat is a defunct slang term for a British soldier. This term applied from the mid-17th century to around 1902 when the British Army wore distinctive scarlet red-coloured coats in their typical military dress.

The use of alternative terms has been practised and advocated by some people to distinguish UK nationals from people living specifically in Great Britain or the British Isles. In practice, this is not usually necessary since British without any modifier (like British cooking) is generally understood to refer to the UK. However, other uses, as in British English, can be taken as referring to the British Isles in their entirety.

In many languages, the equivalent terms for 'English' and 'England' are often used interchangeably with 'British' and 'Britain', and this is also relatively common in many non-British varieties of English. For example in Turkish 'İngiltere' is wrongly used for both Britain and England, despite there being a separate word for Britain, 'Britanya'. Welsh people in particular are very often referred to in French as 'anglais', in Russian as 'англичанин' angličanin, and so on. The same occurs rather less frequently in the case of individuals from Scotland and Northern Ireland. This is perhaps because Wales, although retaining its own language and culture, was formally annexed by England during the Middle Ages. Scotland and Ireland remained separate entities until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries respectively, when the Kingdom of Great Britain and United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland were formed. However, even these countries may still sometimes be considered to form part of Angleterre or the equivalent. In some languages, as in French, forms like britannique ('British') are restricted to more official contexts, and tend to be used for governments rather than for individuals.

In Spain, equivalents of British and English tended previously to be interchangeable. However, growing nationalist and Celtic cultural movements in Spain have led many to acknowledge Scotland and Wales to be different nations, a view that reflects complex Spanish territorial stresses. The distinction is less commonly upheld in Latin America. However, Ireland has always been considered as a different entity, even when it was part of the United Kingdom; this may be due to historical ties between these two Catholic regions.

Sometimes the concepts of "British" and "English" are reversed, even among some English speakers, who think that the use of the terms "English" and "England" are to be avoided, when it is, in fact, their misuse that causes offence. There have been cases, such as in the Finnish press, where the writer has divided "English" into "British" and "Scots". However, this is quite a rare phenomenon.

In India, especially in British India, the British were, and often still are, referred to as firangis/pirangis (aliens) or goras (literally "Whiteman" in Hindi).

Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese use terms for Britain/British which are derived from the words "England" and "English". The Japanese word for Britain has its origins in the Portuguese word for English: Inglês became イギリス Igirisu.

Although the Chinese Yīngguó (Hanzi:英国), Japanese Eikoku (Kanji:英国), Korean Yeongguk (Hangul: 영국), and Vietnamese Anh Quốc are all derived from "Eng-" in England, they are used to mean "Britain" and "British", including both Great Britain and UK. They are still used to mean England in unofficial contexts. There are also more formal specific names for the UK, such as the Chinese 連合王国 Liánhéwángguó literally meaning "United Kingdom". Separate words exist in all of these languages for each of the constituent parts of the UK, including England, although, as elsewhere, there is little awareness of correct usage. However, sport teams are called by their correct name, as can be seen in any World Cup schedule.

The written form of Yīngguó in Chinese is made up of two characters: 英国. The first 英 (ying) is used only for its sound, its meaning disregarded, the second is 国 (guo) which means country/state/kingdom. Originally the word was written as 英吉利 as an approximation of the word English, and is still used to mean England in the Chinese word for the English Channel 英吉利海峡 Yīng jí lì hǎi xiá. The word was given the reading igirisu in Japanese, and the same abbreviation was adopted, 英国 eikoku, taking the first character and using the more usual 'Chinese' reading. These days, the word is usually written using katakana script as イギリス Igirisu, although 英国 Eikoku is still common. ^[5] The first character is also used in the word for the English language, 英語 eigo.^[6] Additionally, Vietnamese đảo Anh (literally, "English island") means the island of Great Britain.

• British Isles (terminology)
• Offensive terms per nationality