Hottentot (racial term) in an ethnic sense. From the eighteenth century onwards, the term "hottentot" was also a term of abuse without a specific ethnic sense, comparable to "barbarian" or "cannibal". In its ethnic sense, it had developed connotations of savagery and primitivism soon already in the seventeenth century: colonial depictions of the Hottentots (Khoikhoi) in the seventeenth to eighteenth century were characterized by savagery, often suggestive of cannibalism or the consumption of raw flesh, physiological features such as steatopygia and elongated labia perceived as primitive or "simian"; and a perception of the click sounds in the Khoikhoi languages as "bestial". Thus it
Hottentot (racial term) of southern Africa was well embedded in colonial scholarly thought by the end of the eighteenth century. The main meaning of "Hottentot" as an ethnic term in the later 19th and the 20th centuries has therefore been to denote the Khoikhoi people specifically. At the same time, however, "Hottentot" also continued to be used through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries in a wider sense, to include all of the people now usually referred to with the modern term "Khoisan" (not only the Khoikhoi, but also the San people, hunter-gatherer populations from the interior of Southern Africa who had not