1871 in reference to the 4c.-6c. North Indian dynasty, from Chandragupta, name of the founder.
also mestee, "octoroon, offspring of a white and a quadroon," also, generally, "a half-caste," 1690s, a West Indian word, a corruption of Spanish mestizo (q.v.).
1745, from American Spanish (where it is attested by 1598), probably from Yavapai (a Yuman language) 'epache "people." Sometimes derived from Zuni apachu "enemy" (see F.W. Hodge, "American Indians," 1907), but this seems to have been the Zuni name for the Navajo.
In French, the sense of "Parisian gangster or thug" is attested by 1902, said to have been coined by journalist Victor Moris; it was in English by 1908. Apache dance was the World War I-era equivalent of 1990s' brutal "slam dancing." Fenimore Cooper's Indian novels were enormously popular in Europe throughout the 19c., and comparisons of Cooper's fictional Indian ways in the wilderness and underworld life in European cities go back to Dumas' "Les Mohicans de Paris" (1854-1859). It is probably due to the imitations of Cooper (amounting almost to plagiarisms) by German author Karl May that Apaches replaced Mohicans as the quintessential savages in European popular imagination. Also compare Mohawk.
1660s, from Persian Hindu (adjective and noun) "Indian," from Hind "India," from Sanskrit sindhu "river," meaning here the Indus; hence "region of the Indus," the sense then gradually was extended by invading peoples to encompass all northern India. "Properly, one of the native race in India descended from the Aryan conquerors. ... More loosely, the name includes also the non-Aryan inhabitants of India" [Century Dictionary, 1902]. As an adjective from 1690s. The Hindu Kush mountain range is said to mean literally "Indian killer," and was said to have been the name given by the Persians to a pass where their Indian slaves had perished in winter, but this likely is folk etymology.
"Indian or mixed-race person of Latin America" (fem. Chola), 1851, from American Spanish (c. 1600), said to be from Nahuatl (Aztecan) xolotl "dog, mutt." Proposed derivation from Mexican city of Cholula seems too late, if this is the same word. In U.S., used of lower-class Mexican immigrants, but by 1970s the word began to be embraced in Latino gang slang in a positive sense.
used loosely since at least 2008 for people, cultures, and products of the Indian subcontinent, especially those living or experienced outside it, literally "local, indigenous; unadulterated, pure," ultimately from Sanskrit desá "land, country." Also as a noun, "person of Indian, Pakistani, or Bangladeshi birth or descent who lives abroad."
Indian group in southwestern Alaska and adjacent parts of Canada, 1865, the people's word for themselves, literally "human beings."
large, aquatic herbivorous mammal of the Indian Ocean and western Pacific, 1800 (by 1789 in French), from Malay (Austronesian) duyung, which is dugung in the Philippines.
