Paleo-eskimo

//ˌpeɪlioʊˈɛskɪmoʊ// noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The inhabitants and/or native cultures of the North American Arctic region before the rise of the modern Eskimo cultures in the region; the Saqqaq, Independence I and II, and/or Dorset cultures and peoples. plural, plural-only

Etymology

From paleo- (“old, primeval”) + Eskimo. The scholar David J. Meltzer writes that the people are "badly named: there is nothing to indicate they are ancestral Eskimo or spoke an Eskimo language; today's Eskimo refer to them as the Tuniit".

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.