Cherokee
Meanings
noun
- A member of an indigenous North American people.
name
- An indigenous North American people.
- Their Iroquoian language, spoken in Oklahoma and North Carolina.
- A syllabary for the Cherokee language invented by Sequoyah.
- A town in Colbert County, Alabama.
- Cherokee Village, Arkansas.
- A census-designated place in Butte County, California.
- A former gold mining settlement in Nevada County, California.
- A city, the county seat of Cherokee County, Iowa.
- A city in Crawford County, Kansas.
- A census-designated place in Swain County and Jackson County, North Carolina, capital of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians
- An unincorporated community in Logan County, Ohio.
- A city, the county seat of Alfalfa County, Oklahoma.
Pronunciation
Word forms
Etymology
Most likely from the Cherokee autonym ᏣᎳᎩ (tsalagi). Derivation from a Choctaw exonym meaning "those who live in caves" (compare chiluk (“cave”)) has also been suggested — the Iroquois term for the Cherokee was Oyata'ge'ronon (“inhabitants of the cave country”) — as has derivation from a Creek term for "person(s) who speak(s) a non-Creek language" (see celokketv (“to speak a non-creek language”)). Whatever its origin, the ethnonym entered European languages at an early date, perhaps as early as the 1670s; in Spanish, the people are called the Tchalaquei as early as 1755.
Synonyms
Derived words
Translations
This entry uses open data from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA/GFDL). Word forms are used for search and are not indexed as separate pages.