One picture holds this whole word: a family whose home travels with them. A wagon or a van, a camp beside a road, and then the camp is gone and the road goes on. English fixed that picture on the Romani people — under a wrong name, because people thought they had come from Egypt — and every other use of the word is that same picture lent out to something else: to a restless person, to the music, to the act of moving on.
From the word’s history
Wiktionary records gypsy as a clipping of Gyptian, itself a shortened Egyptian, from Middle English Egipcian — used because when Roma first appeared in England in the sixteenth century they were wrongly believed to have come from Egypt. The same mistake is inside Spanish gitano and Greek gyftos.
依 Wiktionary 的記載，gypsy 是 Gyptian 削短來的，而 Gyptian 又是 Egyptian 的簡寫。十六世紀羅姆人初到英格蘭時，人們誤以為他們來自埃及，這個名字就這樣定下來了。西班牙文 gitano、希臘文 gyftos 裡裝的是同一個錯誤。知道這件事，也就知道為什麼這個名字本身讓很多人不舒服。
Wiktionary, "gypsy"
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