What term did Tiger Woods coin to describe his mixed ethnic background?

Tiger Woods coined the term “Cablinasian” to describe his mixed ethnic background. The word combines parts of Caucasian, Black, American Indian, and Asian, the four ancestry categories he used when explaining his identity.

Woods’s father, Earl, was African American and also had European and Native American ancestry. His mother, Kultida, was born in Thailand and had Thai, Chinese, and Dutch heritage. Because no single conventional racial label captured that family history, Woods said he had created “Cablinasian” while growing up.

He publicly discussed the term in 1997, shortly after winning the Masters, during an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show. The comment became part of a broader debate about how the media described him, especially because many reports presented him simply as Black or African American. “Cablinasian” is Woods’s personal self-description rather than an official census category, and it should not be confused with terms such as “Amerasian” or “Afro-Asian,” which describe narrower combinations of ancestry.