Lumbee

name, noun

name, noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A member of a certain Native American tribe or group of North Carolina.
Proper Noun
  1. 1
    The dialect (of English) spoken by the Lumbee people.

Etymology

Uncertain. Said to be first attested in reference to the tribe in 1914. Supposed by some to be of Siouan origin. Thought by others to have been coined by Turkey Tayac (1895-1978, the twenty-seventh hereditary chief of the Piscataway) as a combination of Lumber (“a river that flows through the tribe's lands”) and Piscataway bee (“bend”).

Related phrases

native americannorth carolina

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