Dictionaries › English

Mohawk

Pronunciation: /ˈmoʊhɔːk/

The English word “Mohawk” has 5 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. 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.
  2. A hairstyle where both sides are shaved, with the hair along the crest of the head kept long, and usually styled so as to stand straight up.
  3. A member of a gang (the Mohocks) that terrorized London in the early 18th century.

proper noun

  1. The Iroquoian language spoken by these North American indigenous people.
  2. Mohawk River, the largest tributary of the Hudson River, New York.

Etymology

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).

Keep exploring: in the interactive dictionary every word of a definition is a link. Open “Mohawk” there

More English words

About this dictionary

The English dictionary on Glottosphere has 650,529 entries with a page. Browse the English dictionary.

Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.