- race
- race 1 Race, nation, people, even though in technical use they are commonly differentiated, are often used popularly and interchangeably to designate one of a number of great divisions of mankind, each made up of an aggregate of persons who are thought of, or think of themselves, as comprising a distinct unit. In technical discriminations, all more or less controversial and often lending themselves to great popular misunderstanding or misuse, race is anthropological and ethnological in force, usually implying a distinct physical type with certain unchanging characteristics (as a particular color of skin or shape of skull){
the Caucasian race
}{the Mongolian race
}Sometimes, and more controversially, other presumed common factors are chosen, as place of origin{the Nordic race
}or common root language{the Aryan race
}In popular use race can apply to any more or less clearly defined group thought of as a unit usually because of a common or presumed common past{the Anglo-Saxon race
}{the Celtic race
}{the Hebrew race
}Nation, primarily political in force, usually designates the citizenry as a whole of a sovereign state and implies a certain homogeneity because of com-mon laws, institutions, customs, or loyalty{the British nation
}{the French nation
}{the house must have been built before this country was a nation— Tate
}{what is a nation? A group of human beings recognizing a common history and a common culture, yearning for a common destiny, assuming common habits, and generally attached to a specific piece of the earth's surface— David Bernstein
}Sometimes it is opposed to state{a state is accidental; it can be made or unmade; but a nation is something real which can be neither made nor destroyed— J. R. Green
}and often not clearly distinguishable from race in comprising any large group crossing national boundaries and with something significantly in common{the children of the world are one nation; the very old, another— Jan Struther
}{for the two nations that inhabit the earth, the rich and the poor— Sitwell
}{the Gypsy nation
}People, sometimes interchangeable with nation though stressing a cultural or social rather than a national unity, can apply to a body of persons, as a whole or as individuals, who show a consciousness of solidarity or common characteristics suggesting a common culture or common interests or ideals and a sense of kinship{the Mexican people— Prewett
}{the British and American peoples— Sir Winston Churchill
}{we, the people of the United States— U. S. Constitution
}{we, the peoples of the United Nations— U. N. Charter
}{a new government, which, for certain purposes, would make the people of the several states one people— Taney
}2 *variety, subspecies, breed, cultivar, strain, clone, stock
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.
