Patapsco

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A river flowing through the states of Maryland and Virginia on the eastern coast of the United States, emptying into Chesapeake Bay
2. A waterway in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States that drains parts of Maryland and Virginia before reaching Chesapeake Bay
3. The name of a stream in the eastern United States, located in Maryland and Virginia, that feeds into the broad Chesapeake Bay

Etymology: The name belongs to a river in Maryland, and it comes from the Patapsco, an Algonquian-speaking people who lived along its banks before European colonization. The river took the group's name, so the place name is older than the English settlers who later used it. Like many Algonquian place names recorded by colonists, the spelling varies in early sources, and English writers rendered the sounds in several ways. The exact meaning of the name is uncertain. Some sources suggest it describes the river's tidal or backwater character, but no firm translation has been confirmed. Because the language was not written down by its speakers, the name survives only in colonial transcriptions, which makes its original sense hard to recover.