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A quintroon is the offspring of an octoroon and a European parent, having ancestry that is one-sixteenth African. This term, like others in the same series (such as octoroon and quadroon), is considered obsolete and is no longer in general use.
The prefix quint- is apparently intended to mean fifth, as in "fifth-generation," even though the one black ancestor of a quintroon would have been a great-great-grandparent, and thus only four generations older than the person so designated. A more accurate label was hexadecaroon (conveying the essence of "one-sixteenth"), but the latter term was used far less often than quintroon.
See also one-drop theory.
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