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Description: Although explicit verbal expression of prejudice and stereotypes have become less common due to the recent rise of social norms against prejudice, prejudice in language still persists in more subtle forms. Leveraging a natural language corpus of 1.8 million newspaper articles, the present study examined patterns and biases underlying the language associated with 60 U.S. minority groups. We found that human perception of social distance has its linguistic footprint in language production: Groups perceived as socially distant (vs. close) are also more likely to be mentioned in abstract (vs. concrete) language. There was also a strong positive correlation between valence and concreteness unique to language concerning minority groups, suggesting a strong bias for more socially distant groups to be represented in negative contexts. We also investigated the content of outgroup prejudice by applying a topic model on language referencing minority groups in the context of immigration, which highlights their outgroup identity. We identified 15 immigrant-related topics (e.g., politics, arts, crime, illegal workers), the strength of their association with each minority group, and their relation with perceived sentiment towards minority groups. Our approach to prejudice provides a practical and ecologically valid method for comparing prejudice towards a large number of minority groups in both degree and content, supports and elucidates prior theories of outgroup prejudice, and offers a way forward for research in this area.