black legend
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.40 in modern English
21
Scrabble Score
11
Letters
3
Syllables
9
Unique Chars
Meaning
name
The depiction of Spain and Spaniards (or, by extension, all Hispanics and their countries of origin) as bloodthirsty and cruel, greedy and fanatical, especially concerning the colonial period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.
noun
Historiographical phenomenon in which a sustained trend in historical writing of biased reporting and introduction of fabricated, exaggerated and/or decontextualized facts is directed against particular persons, nations or institutions with the intention of creating a distorted and uniquely inhuman image of them.
name
Alternative letter-case form of Black Legend.
Example Sentences
- "[…]if the black legend seemed to be fading at last, the horrors of the Civil War revived it with a vengeance. Never was a conflict fought more bitterly."
- "Here the problem is aggravated by the mutually reinforcing influences of the ‘black legend’ of Spanish greed and cruelty, and the contrasting myth of the American Indian as ‘noble savage’."
Etymology
Inflected Forms
the Black Legend (canonical)
black legends (plural)