A 1663 guinea coin with the head of Charles II above a small elephant on the obverse and the shields of the four countries of the United Kingdom on the reverse
1 December 2020
Guinea is a word with many seemingly unrelated senses but which are actually connected. It can refer to one of several countries in Africa, a sum of British money equaling £1.05, or it can be a derogatory name for an Italian American.
The word first appears as a European name for the west coast of Africa. The name’s origin unknown, but it appears first in Portuguese as Guiné. This toponymic use survives today in the names of the countries of Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, and Guinea-Bissau. Guinea makes its English language appearance in a 1555 translation of Pietro Martire Anghiera’s The Decades of the New Worlde:
The thyrde day of October abowt mydnyght, the capytayne commaunded theym to lyght fyrebrandes and to hoyse vp theyr sayles directynge theyr course towarde the South, saylynge betwene Capo Verde of Affryke and the Ilandes lyinge abowt the same, beinge from the Equinoctiall .xiiii. degrees and a halfe. They sayled thus, manye dayes in the syght of the coaste of Guinea, of Ethiope, where is the mountayne cauled Serra Liona beinge .viii. degrees aboue the Equinoctiall.
Guinea quickly became an adjective referring to anything from or having to do with Africa. A Guinea-man, for instance, was a ship that conducted trade, in slaves as well as in other cargo, with Africa. And in British North America, guinea came to denote a slave from Africa, as opposed to one born in the Americas. From an 18 April 1745 Boston newspaper:
That three Privateers belonging to New York, commanded by Capts. Langdon, Morgan and Jeffries, had brought in a Sloop to New Providence, which they took on the Spanish Main (deserted by all the Men except a Dutch Man and 4 Guinea Negroes,) on board of which they have found between 50 and 60,000 Dollars.
And by the early nineteenth century, Guinea was functioning as a noun referring to any Black person. From James Fenimore Cooper’s 1823 The Pioneers:
But damn the bit of manners has the fellow any more than if he was one of them Guineas, down in the kitchen there.
And it continued to refer to Black and mixed-race people well into the twentieth century. For instance, a particular group of mixed race people in and around Barbour County, West Virginia went by that name. From Hu Maxwell’s 1899 history of that county, which reflects the racist attitudes that others held about them:
There is a clan of partly-colored people in Barbour County often called “Guineas,” under the erroneous presumption that they are Guinea negroes. They vary in color from white to black, often have blue eyes and straight hair, and they are generally industrious. Their number in Barbour is estimated at one thousand.
But in the late nineteenth century, Guinea came to be used as a derogatory name for Italian-Americans, and eventually other ethnicities from the Mediterranean region. Exactly why is unknown. It may be because many people from the Mediterranean have darker complexions than those typical of northern Europeans, or it may have been an epithet pointing to their place on the social ladder alongside Blacks. This appearance in the New York Tribune of 17 July 1882 shows that early use may have specifically been in reference to those born in Italy, as opposed to Italian-Americans born in North America, before expanding to include all Italian-Americans, an expansion that parallels the term’s expansion from those born in Africa to eventually include all Black people:
The “hoodlum” of New-York, with his senses deadened to the beauty of the Latin tongue and mellow Neapolitan accent, has bestowed upon the races that use it with volubility the names of “Guineas” and “Dagoes.”
[...]
The chances are strongly in favor of their receiving a shower of stones on the way, from the ragged gamins in the street, who cry out at every fresh arrival of Guineas. But they are soon with their countrymen, and when they see on every side Italian signs over the doorways and swart Italian faces peering out the windows, they feel themselves perfectly at home.
That leaves us with how guinea came to be associated with British currency. In 1663, the Royal Mint began issuing a gold coin, nominally worth 20 shillings, for use by the Company of Royal Adventurers of England trading with Africa. As with other things associated with Africa, the coin quickly acquired the name guinea. From Samuel Pepys diary of 29 October 1666:
And so to my goldsmith to bid him look out for some gold for me; and he tells me that Ginnys, which I bought 2000 of not long ago, and cost me but 18½d change, will now cost me 22d, and but very few to be had at any price.
The sums that Pepys refers to are the fees charged by the goldsmith for converting silver into gold. The coin fluctuated in value, eventually ending up with a nominal value of 21 shillings before it stopped being issued in 1813. But the name guinea survived, mainly in specialty applications like gambling on horse racing, in the sense of 21 shillings, or in today’s decimal currency, £1.05.
So, that’s it. While the different senses seem, on the surface, to be unrelated, they all go back to Africa.
Sources:
Anghiera, Pietro Martire. The Decades of the New Worlde. Richard Eden, trans. London: Guilhelmi Powell for Edwarde Sutton, 1555, 217r–v. Early English Books Online (EEBO)
The Boston Weekly News-Letter, 18 April 1745, 2. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Cooper, James Fenimore. The Pioneers, vol. 3 of 3. London: John Murray, 1823, 106. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Dictionary of American Regional English, 2013, s.v. Guinea, n.1.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. guinea, n.1.
“The Italian Quarter.” The New York Tribune, 17 July 1882, 8. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Maxwell, Hu. The History of Barbour County, West Virginia (1899). Parsons, West Virginia: McClain Printing, 1968, 310. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. Guinea, n.
Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 7 of 10. Robert Latham and William Matthews, eds. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1972, 346. HathTrust Digital Archive.
Photo credit: Sovereign Rarities, Vcoins.com.