Who are the Gypsies?

Gypsy (roma tigan rrom tzigane) (Roman / Romania)
Originally uploaded by adypellegrino

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) states that a gypsy is a "member of a wandering race (by themselves called Romany), of Hindu origin, which first appeared in England about the beginning of the 16th c. and was then believed to have come from Egypt". The OED records the first usage of the word in English as 1514, says Wikipedia, with several more in the same century, and that both Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare used the word.[1]

The word derives from the word for "Egyptian" in Latin, the same as the Spanish Gitano or the French Gitan. It emerged in Europe, in the 15th century, after their migration into the land of the Romani people (aka Roma) in that continent.[2] They received this name from the local people either because they spread in Europe from an area named Little Egypt, in Southern Balkans or because they fitted the European image of dark-skinned Egyptians skilled in witchcraft. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was written in various ways: Egipcian, Egypcian, 'gipcian, 'gypcian[3]. As the time elapsed, the notion of Gypsy evolved including other stereotypes, like nomadism, exoticism.[4]

The brilliant Belgian jazz guitarist Django Rheinhardt was a Gypsy.