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mohawk

Today it means: A member of an indigenous people of North America originally from the Mohawk Valley in upstate New York to southern Quebec and eastern Ontario, the easternmost of the Iroquois Five Nations. Full definition →

Dutch Mohawk ← Narragansett Mohowaúgsuck

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The story

Narragansett · derived fromMohowaúgsuck
Dutch · borrowed fromMohawk
English todayMohawk

From Dutch Mohawk. An exonym, probably from Narragansett Mohowaúgsuck, Mauquàuog, meaning “they eat (animate things)”, “cannibals”. The phoneme /m/ is not present in the Mohawk language; the Mohawk autonym is Kanienʼkehá꞉kaʼ (Kanienkehaka, Kanyenkehaka).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.