Shawnees

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Groups of people belonging to the Shawnee nation of Native Americans who lived in the Ohio Valley ; the individuals from that nation considered as a collective
2. Several members of the Algonquian-speaking Native American tribe historically based in the Ohio River region ; the people of that tribe taken together
3. The plural form referring to the Native American people known as the Shawnee ; the members of that community as a whole

Etymology: The word is the plural of "Shawnee," and the singular is the one with the real story. The name comes from the Shawnee language itself: "saawanwa," the people's own name for themselves, or "saawanoki," meaning "southerners." That makes it a name the group gave, not one imposed from outside, though the English spelling has drifted a long way from the original sound. The path into English is less certain. Scholars have proposed a go-between language, such as Munsee "sawanow," to explain how the name reached European ears, but this link is a supposition rather than something firmly documented. A more solid explanation is that English speakers reanalysed "Shawnese," an older form of the name, as if it were a plural, and then built a singular "Shawnee" back from it. The plural "Shawnees" is therefore the form that came first in the sense of a people, and the singular grew out of it.