Squaw
noun ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A woman, wife; especially a Native American woman. ethnic, offensive, slur
"The Indian maids, of course, turned out to be a few fat old squaws who knew all about white men."
- 2 derogatory terms for an American Indian woman wordnet
Example
More examples"Squaw Valley, California, is one of the largest ski resorts in the United States."
Etymology
From Massachusett squàw (“woman”), from Proto-Algonquian *eθkwe·wa (“(young) woman”). Cognate with Abenaki -skwa (“female, wife”), Mohegan-Pequot sqá, Cree iskwew / ᐃᐢᑫᐧᐤ (iskeyw, “woman”), Ojibwe ikwe (“woman”). In the 1970s, some non-linguists began to claim that the word originally meant vagina; this has been discredited. The first English attestation of the word is found in a book called Mourt’s Relation: A Journey of the Pilgrims at Plymouth written in 1622, where the "squa sachim or Massachusets Queen" is mentioned in a journal entry from September 20, 1621.
Related phrases
More for "squaw"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.