 The sense of "different cultural groups", and in American English "racial, cultural or national minority group" arises in the 1930s to 1940s, serving as a replacement of the term race which had earlier taken this sense but was now becoming deprecated due to its association with ideological racism.The abstract "ethnicity" had been used for "paganism" in the 18th century, but now came to express the meaning of an "ethnic character" (first recorded 1953).The term "ethnic group" was first recorded in 1935 and entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1972.