Arawak
Americannoun
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a member of an Indian people once widespread in the Antilles but now living primarily in coastal northeastern South America.
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any of the related Arawakan languages spoken by the Arawak.
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of Arawak
First recorded in 1835–40; a self-designation of the Arawak people
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Columbus used his foreknowledge of a lunar eclipse to force the Arawak residents of present-day Jamaica to heel in fear.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 6, 2024
The term hurricane derives from hurakan, an Arawak word for a storm god.
From New York Times ● Nov. 2, 2022
Colón landed in Puerto Rico in 1493 accompanied by Spaniard Ponce de León, who later became the island’s first governor and quelled an uprising by the native Tainos, a subgroup of the Arawak Indians.
From Washington Times ● Jul. 11, 2020
It did in fact take a tribe to lay the ground for the phenomenon—specifically, the pre-Columbian Arawak tribe of Hispaniola, who slow-cooked meat over green wood.
From Time ● Jul. 4, 2016
Southeast, and the Arawak languages of the West Indies.
From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond
Some contemporary Indigenous groups, including the Arawaks and Piaroa, descend from these ancient societies.
From Science Magazine ● Jun. 3, 2024
Their name derived from the Spanish word for “wild,” and they had been imported from Africa to replace the indigenous people, the Arawaks, nearly all of whom had been killed by the Spanish.
From The New Yorker ● Jan. 20, 2020
We are a people, the Arawaks and Taínos might have said, even as they died trying to prove it.
From New York Times ● Nov. 6, 2017
The Garífuna are descendants of West Africans who were shipwrecked in 1635 off the coast of St. Vincent, where they intermarried with the indigenous Arawaks and Caribs.
From The New Yorker ● Mar. 23, 2015
We remember Columbus and the Arawaks, Cortes and the Aztecs, even the fate of the Tlingit in the generations after La Perouse.
From "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
