wog · noun, verb1
The origins are not entirely clear. The term was first noted by the lexicographer F.C. Bowen in 1929, in his Sea Slang: a dictionary of the old-timers’ expressions and epithets, where he defines wogs as "lower class Babu shipping clerks on the Indian coast." The most common theory is that it is a clipping of golliwog, which was first used as the name of a black-faced doll in Florence Upton’s 1895 book The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwogg. A variety of folk etymologies exist, with the most common claiming that the word is an acronym for one of either westernized, worthy, wily, or wonderful preceding “Oriental gentlemen”. Another erroneous claim is that it was used in the mid 1800s, with WOGS (meaning Working On Government Service) stencilled on the shirts of Indian workers in Egypt. The Scientologist sense is from the usage of L. Ron Hubbard, who apparently accepted the folk etymology from “worthy Oriental gentleman” but employed the term to mean “common ordinary run-of-the-mill garden-variety humanoid”.
wog · noun2
Clipping of polliwog (“a tadpole”).
wog · noun3
Unknown. Probably from Etymology 2, a clipping of polliwog (“a tadpole”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.