Definition of "ethnic" []

• Of, relating to, or characteristic of a sizable group of people sharing a common and distinctive racial, national, religious, linguistic, or cultural heritage. (adjective)
• Being a member of a particular ethnic group, especially belonging to a national group by heritage or culture but residing outside its national boundaries: ethnic Hungarians living in northern Serbia. (adjective)
• Relating to a people not Christian or Jewish. (adjective)
• A member of a particular ethnic group, especially one who maintains the language or customs of the group. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "The man renowned as the “Butcher of the Balkans”—engineer of bloody ethnic wars across the former Yugoslavia, from Bosnia and Croatia to Kosovo, and whose actions created the term ethnic cleansing—hung on through debilitating sanctions and even a seventy-eight-day NATO bombing blitz in 1999 to force Serbian units out of Kosovo."
• "This was the war that popularized the term "ethnic cleansing," a euphemism for the forced transfer of populations purely on the basis of their ethnic background or religion."
• "Through them it examines the broader conflict, which killed more than 100,000 people, displaced 2 million more and introduced the term "ethnic cleansing" to the lexicon of war."