Blackbirders

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Traders who seized Pacific Islanders by force or deception and sold them into forced labour, especially on plantations in the nineteenth century
2. Kidnappers of South Sea islanders in the nineteenth century, who abducted people and transported them to work as unpaid labourers abroad
3. Those who took Pacific islanders against their will in the 1800s and shipped them overseas to toil on farms and plantations

Etymology: "Blackbirders" is the plural of "blackbirder", a noun formed from "blackbird" and the suffix "-er". The base word is the familiar songbird, and the sense built on it has nothing to do with birds at all, which is what makes the word worth a look. The ending itself is ancient: "-er" descends from an Old English agent suffix, ultimately from Latin "-arius", which English picked up through Old French and which marks a person who does or deals in something. The earlier part of the word has a plain, documented meaning: the blackbird is a bird of the thrush family, and "blackbirder" in its root sense is simply a person connected with birds of that kind. Most readers, though, will meet the word in its later and grimmer use, for those who captured and trafficked Pacific Islanders, and that connection is the one the compound carries in modern dictionaries. The suffix tells you the word names a person by occupation, while the first element supplies the image that turned an ordinary name for a songbird into a term of the slave trade.

Synonyms: slave trader, kidnapper, slaver