Classics 22: Etymology


The following contains the more familiar English words that originated in North American, South American, Central American, and Hawaiian indigenous languages.

All words and etymologies taken from Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary and its Addenda Section ("W3" from now on).

Listed below are a couple hundred English words that came from New World languages, namely those from North America, South America, Central America, and Hawaii. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, perhaps 2000 languages were spoken in the geographical area covered here. Many of those languages are still spoken, while many more have gone extinct or are spoken by only a few people. Those languages are from many different language families.

English adopted words primarily for plants, animals, foods, and place names from the native languages, and from only a few of the many languages at that. The source used to find these words was Merriam-Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. There are, of course, many more such words from indigenous AMerican languages found in Merriam-Webster's Unabridged Dictionary than are listed here, and many many more that are not even in MWU, but almost all of those not listed here are more obscure than those listed here (the exceptions likely have variant spellings, such as moccasin, which is also spelled mocassin: I was also interested in words that would be eligible to be used in spelling bees when I investigated this material, and at that time, words with variants were not used in the spelling bees I was involved in).

Generally speaking, words were first adopted into the language of the Europeans who conquered and colonized the people who used the words.
Although there were native writing systems in some cases, the conquerors inevitably used their own languages' spelling and sound patterns to change the words they borrowed, and so Spanish, Portuguese, or English spelling patterns can often be seen. For example, the "Mexican potato" called the "jicama" would not have been written that way had English speakers first adopted the word (the original Nahuatl is now written xicama or xicamutl).