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Squaw

//skwɔː// noun

Definitions

Noun
  1. 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. 2
    derogatory terms for an American Indian woman wordnet

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.

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