Spokane

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A city in eastern Washington State in the northwestern United States ; a Native American people of the Pacific Northwest who historically lived along the Spokane River
2. The largest city in eastern Washington State, located on the Spokane River ; a Salish-speaking Indigenous group whose traditional homeland lies in the Inland Northwest
3. A municipality in eastern Washington State on the Spokane River ; the Indigenous people of the Inland Pacific Northwest who take their name from that river

Etymology: The city and the Spokane people take their name from the Spokane Tribe, whose own name for themselves is usually given as "Spoqe'ind," which is often glossed as "round head." That gloss is worth pausing on, because the more familiar explanations, "children of the Sun" and "muddy people," are popular etymologies that linguist Barry Pritzker argued in 2011 most likely grew up around the name rather than describing its origin. The "round head" gloss has a plausible origin in the way the name was taken up by outsiders. Early European and American speakers recorded the name in various spellings, and the modern English form reflects that process of adaptation rather than a translation. Readers who meet the word on a map or in a historical text are therefore looking at an outsider's rendering of an Indigenous name.