What does niggardly mean?

Answer 1

It means stingy or miserly, or inappropriately small or scanty (e.g. "a niggardly tip for a waiter"). It comes from the noun "niggard," which is not at all related to the racial slur it sounds like. The word actually comes from Old Norse (Scandinavian) hnygghard meaning "stingy." Because it sounds like the racial slur, the words "niggard" and "niggardly" are often avoided nowadays because people ignorant of the etymology misconstrue these words as slurs as well. However, they are not racial slurs, although "niggardly" and "niggard" are not complimentary in meaning.

Answer 2

The first and only use of niggard is a stingy, grasping person, a miser. Niggard is from the Swedish nig, akin to Old Norse hröggr. It has no connection whatsoever with the n- word, which derives from the Spanish negro, meaning black. If your question really is "When was the word niggard first used in English?" we may never know, exactly. Chaucer (ca. 1380) writes A ful gret fool is he, i wis/ That bothe riche and nygard is.

The site "Take Our Word For It" in issue 26 claims that the first available written record of "Niggardly" is from 1530 (although the article fails to present this record). "Niggard" is reported to have been used by (Geoffery) Chaucer as early as 1374, and Shakespeare used it at some point. The same article claims that Middle English had a word "nig" which meant stingy. Although, another site "The Online Etymology Dictionary" has no listing of the word "nig", and a Google search reveals no etymological reference whatsoever save of course abbreviations for "Nigeria". As a side note, in all of the recent (and not so recent) debates surrounding this word, people almost always focus on the etymology and completely miss the point, it's not what the word means, but what the person means when they use it. The Italian word "melanzana" or "muli" is innocent enough, it just means "eggplant", but when it is used as a slur to refer to dark-skinned people, it's not innocent at all.

If the person in question is well read of Chaucer and Shakespeare and thinks the word is just synonym for "parsimonious" well that's fine, although it's unfortunate that they are insensitive to the phonetic connotation almost everyone around them is sure to make.

If the person thinks the word derives from the racial slur, well that's another issue entirely. The tragedy is that when it becomes an issue, people easily lie about what they think or thought, so it's often hard to get at the truth.