American: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

American, when used as an adjective, can mean of the United States of America or of or relating to the Americas; when used as a noun, United States citizen, residing in the Americas, or less frequently American English.

English language speakers, especially outside of Latin America, generally use "American" to refer to the United States only; the same is true of cognates of the word in many other languages, such as the German Amerikaner and the Greek Αμερικανός (Amerikanos). The CIA World Factbook lists "American" as both the noun and adjective forms of Nationality for a citizen of the United States.

As many people from the various nations throughout the New World consider themselves to be "Americans," some think the common usage of "American" to refer to only people from the United States should be avoided in international contexts where it might cause confusion. Many alternative neologisms to "American" have been proposed to refer to the United States, but they have failed to garner widespread acceptance. See Alternative words for American for more information.

In Spanish, the normal term is estadounidense (literally United-Statesian). In the Iberoamerican countries, the use of "americano" to describe a US citizen could be considered politically incorrect and culturally aggressive, because the word in Spanish habitually includes the inhabitants of the entire New World. In Portuguese, both in Portugal and Brazil , the term estadunidense is growing and it is considered more correct than the common term Norte-Americano (literally North American).

The American race is an obsolete 19th-century racial classification referring to the various peoples now called Native Americans, also historically called the "red" race, although that latter term is generally considered derogatory.