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''squaw'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260313192153-00-⌔

squaw - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

squaw (plural squaws)

  • (now offensive, ethnic slur) A woman, wife; especially a Native American woman.
    • ✤ The Indian maids, of course, turned out to be a few fat old squaws who knew all about white men.1

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.2 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, 1621.3

Pronunciation

  • IPA: /skwɔː/
  • Audio (Southern England): 🔊
  • Rhymes: -ɔː

Printed 2026-06-28.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

  1. 1963, Lester del Rey, The Sky Is Falling: ↩

  2. Ives Goddard, The True History of the Word Squaw, in Indian Country News (April 1997), page 17A ↩

  3. The Word Squaw: Offensive or Not?, indiancountrytoday.com (archived) ↩

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