Wop is a pejorative term forItalians or people of Italian descent.[1]
TheMerriam-Webster dictionary states wop's first known use was in the United States in 1908, and that it originates from theSouthern Italian dialectal termguappo, roughly meaning "dandy", or "swaggerer", derived from the Spanish termguapo, meaning "good-looking", "dandy", from Latinvappa for "sour wine", also "worthless fellow".[2][3][4]
InNeapolitan and other Southern Italo-Romance varieties,guappo is pronounced roughly aswahp-po.[5][6] As word-final vowels in Southern Italian varieties are often realized as /ə/,guappo would often sound closer towahpp to anglophones.Guappo historically refers to a type of flashy, boisterous, swaggering, dandy-like man.[6] The word eventually became associated with members of theCamorra and has often been used in the Naples area as a friendly or humorous term of address among men.[7] The word likely transformed into the slur "wop" following the arrival ofpoor Italian immigrants into the United States. The termguappo was especially used by older Italian immigrant males to refer to the younger Italian male immigrants arriving in America.[8][5]
Onefalse etymology orbackronym of wop is that it is anacronym for "without passport" or "without papers", implying that Italian immigrants entered the U.S. asundocumented or illegal immigrants.[9][10][11] The term has nothing to do with immigration documents, as these were not required by U.S. immigration officers until 1924,[12] after the slur had already come into use in the United States.[10]
Another backronym is that wop stands for "working on pavement", based on a stereotype that Italian immigrants andItalian-American men typically do manual labor such as road-building.[13][14] Turning acronyms into words did not become common practice until after World War II, accelerating along with the growth of the US space-program and the Cold War. The first use of wop significantly predates that period.[9]
The dictionary definition ofwop at Wiktionary