And if Merriam-Webster Inc. doesn't act quickly, officials of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People said, they will pressure schools, colleges and universities to boycott Webster dictionaries.

Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary first defines the word as "a black person -- usually taken to be offensive" or "a member of any dark-skinned race -- usually taken to be offensive." A subsequent part of the entry says the word "now ranks as perh aps the most offensive and inflammatory racial slur in English." "There clearly needs to be a correction immediately," NAACP president Kweisi Mfume declared. "A nigger is not a black person or a member of a dark-skinned race as defined by Merriam-Webster. It is not a definition of a person's race, but a derogat ory word."

The NAACP did not go as far as grassroots protesters from Michigan, who touched off a national debate on hate speech and censorship this month by demanding that the word be eliminated from the dictionary.

"The word needs to be removed," said Kathryn Williams, curator of the Museum of African American History in Flint, who sent petitions signed by hundreds of angry people to the dictionary-publishing company in Springfield, Mass.

Another leader of the campaign, Delphine Abraham of Ypsilanti, said she was "really surprised to see that it's in the dictionary in 1997."

Last week, Merriam-Webster officials, replying to the petitions, said its definition of the word follows the form used for other ethnic slurs, listing the oldest usage first, followed by its current usage.

"We do not believe that we can make offensive words go out of existence by leaving them out of the dictionary," said Frederick Mish, editor in chief of Merriam-Webster. "People do not learn these words from the dictionary, nor would they refrain from usi ng them if we left them out."

Publisher John M. Morse said last week that Merriam-Webster would reexamine its definition for the next edition. New editions are issued every 10 years, but minor changes are made annually.

Merriam-Webster officials did not respond yesterday to the NAACP announcement.

African American commentators are divided over whether to excise the word from dictionaries.

In a column distributed by Pacific News Service, Earl Ofari Hutchinson, author of several books on black culture, said he wanted it eliminated because a word so emotionally charged "can reinforce and perpetuate stereotypes."

But Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page, who is black, denounced the movement to eliminate the word from the dictionary.

"As an African American who works with words for a living, I do not view this as black America's finest hour," Page wrote. "Quite the contrary, hair-trigger attempts to reduce a word's power by censoring it only increase its power."

The word originally meant black and was derived from Latin, French and Spanish words for black. It is uncertain exactly when it became a racial slur, but its current meaning is still evolving.