Some Roma consider the term "Gypsy" pejorative. Yet, the catalogue to the Roma Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale insisted that Roma was too narrow a term, as it excluded groups such as Sintis, Romunglo, Beas, Gitanes and Manus.

They received this name from the local people either because they spread in Europe from an area named Little Egypt, in Southern Balkans or because they resembled the European imagery of Egyptians as dark-skinned people skilled in witchcraft (in fact they arrived from Northern India).

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was written in various ways: Egipcian, Egypcian, 'gipcian, 'gypcian. As the time elapsed, the notion of Gypsy evolved including other stereotypes, like nomadism, exoticism.