Susquehannock

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A member of an Iroquoian-speaking Native American people who lived along the Susquehanna River in what is now Pennsylvania and Maryland
2. An individual belonging to the indigenous nation that inhabited the Susquehanna River valley in the mid-Atlantic region of North America
3. One of the Native American people historically settled along the Susquehanna River, whose culture and language were related to other Iroquoian groups

Etymology: The Susquehannock were an Iroquoian-speaking people of the Susquehanna River valley, in what is now Pennsylvania, Maryland and New York, and their name is an exonym: it was applied to them from outside rather than chosen by them. The name is generally said to come from an Algonquian language, and it is said to mean "people of the muddy river." The river itself took its name from the same source, so the people and the waterway are named for one another. The attribution is worth a moment's caution. The meaning is a gloss offered for a name that reached English through other colonists' records, and the exact Algonquian form and its breakdown are not firmly established. What is clear is the pattern: European settlers wrote down the names given to peoples and places by their neighbours, and those written forms then stuck.