How much do we owe the original inhabitants of this continent? When it comes to names, quite a bit.

Take a word as American as you can get — barbeque. This word originated in the Caribbean with the Taino culture as a term for a wooden frame used for cooking meat over fire. Europeans adopted it with a more general meaning — as both the cooking method and a gathering.

One of my favorite words in any language is chocolate. The indigenous language Nahuatl, at one time the official language of the Aztec Empire, had a word, originally xocolātl, to describe a bitter cacao drink. The name evolved into Spanish, then English, and came to mean anything made from cocoa beans.

A large category of original American names involves animals. Skunk comes from the Algonquian word squnk, which literally means “urinating fox.” It fit so well the settlers used it. And then there is moose from the Eastern Abenaki language, a part of the Algonquian family, where it translated as “he strips off bark,” a literal description of an animal behavior. This was another word useful enough to be dropped directly into English.

If this interests you, see “12 Native American Words That You Use Daily Without Even Knowing It” at https://www.dictionaryscoop.com/article/12-Native-American-words-that-you-use-daily-without-even-knowing-it?