Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A family of North American Indian languages spoken or formerly spoken in an area from Labrador to the Carolinas between the Atlantic coast and the Rocky Mountains.
  • noun A member of a people traditionally speaking an Algonquian language.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Pertaining to or designating the most extensive of the linguistic families of North American Indians, their territory formerly including practically all of Canada east of the 115th meridian and south of Hudson's Bay and the part of the United States east of the Mississippi and north of Tennessee and Virginia, with the exception of the territory occupied by the northern Iroquoian tribes. There are nearly 100,000 Indians of the Algonquian tribes, of which the strongest are the Ojibwas (Chippewas), Ottawas, Crees, Algonquins, Micmacs, and Blackfeet.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Relating to a group of North American languages.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a member of any of the North American Indian groups speaking an Algonquian language and originally living in the subarctic regions of eastern Canada; many Algonquian tribes migrated south into the woodlands from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic coast
  • noun family of North American Indian languages spoken from Labrador to South Carolina and west to the Great Plains
  • adjective of or relating to an Algonquian tribe or its people or language

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[From Algonquin.]

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Examples

  • 1 Strong, Captive selves, captivating others: the politics and poetics of colonial American capitivity narratives (1999), p.37 (see link): "The English word Eskimo derives from a pejorative Algonquian term meaning 'raw meat eater,' and Inuit is the preferred term in the Eastern Arctic."

    Archive 2008-05-01 2008

  • 1 Strong, Captive selves, captivating others: the politics and poetics of colonial American capitivity narratives (1999), p.37 (see link): "The English word Eskimo derives from a pejorative Algonquian term meaning 'raw meat eater,' and Inuit is the preferred term in the Eastern Arctic."

    A note about 'Inuit' and 'Eskimo' 2008

  • Along with shipments of tobacco grown in America, English-speakers would soon be in receipt of Native American words such as the Algonquian powwow and moccasin.viii But given that Renaissance is yet another borrowed term, French for “rebirth,” perhaps Cheke would have preferred that we refer to his day, more “natively,” as the Birthagaindom?

    The English Is Coming! Leslie Dunton-Downer 2010

  • Along with shipments of tobacco grown in America, English-speakers would soon be in receipt of Native American words such as the Algonquian powwow and moccasin.viii But given that Renaissance is yet another borrowed term, French for “rebirth,” perhaps Cheke would have preferred that we refer to his day, more “natively,” as the Birthagaindom?

    The English Is Coming! Leslie Dunton-Downer 2010

  • The city was once in the territory of the Algonquian people, an early American Indian tribe.

    Five Things That Happened On May 3rd | myFiveBest 2010

  • Is there a way to turn the Kristianos against the Coosa, or perhaps the Algonquian Nations up north?

    Fire The Sky W. Michael Gear 2011

  • Her efforts were successful, to the point that when she later met with people who spoke other Algonquian languages, such as Delaware, she found that they could understand each other.

    Nataly Kelly: A Language Comes Home for Thanksgiving Nataly Kelly 2011

  • Is there a way to turn the Kristianos against the Coosa, or perhaps the Algonquian Nations up north?

    Fire The Sky W. Michael Gear 2011

  • The film also shows how Jessie tapped into the work of other Algonquian languages as well as the Wampanoag corpus in order to reconstruct the grammar and build a dictionary and pedagogical materials for the language.

    Nataly Kelly: A Language Comes Home for Thanksgiving Nataly Kelly 2011

  • Seeking to take the project further, Jessie applied for a research fellowship in 1996 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT, where she worked with renowned scholars in Algonquian languages, including the late Ken Hale and Norvin Richards.

    Nataly Kelly: A Language Comes Home for Thanksgiving Nataly Kelly 2011

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