Coast Salish
Americannoun
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a branch of the Salishan family of languages spoken in the Pacific Northwest, including Lushootseed, Halkomelem, and Squamish.
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a member of a group of Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest traditionally speaking one of these languages.
adjective
Etymology
Origin of Coast Salish
First recorded in 1920–25
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.
The school’s main campus is in Seattle, and in 2015 it adopted a statement recognizing “the Coast Salish peoples.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 29, 2025
Smuy offers a clever exchange to Spaal’, and this comic tale is inspired by the Pacific Northwest’s Coast Salish culture.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 25, 2024
Coast Salish tribes, at the forefront of the North Cascades mountain goat monitoring efforts, have deep cultural ties to the animals.
From Seattle Times ● May 22, 2024
LaPointe’s “Thunder Song,” despite being an essay collection, is just as much autobiographical as LaPointe’s first book “Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk,” which came out in 2022.
From Seattle Times ● Apr. 10, 2024
It was the same technique that the Coast Salish peoples of the Northwest had used for centuries to fashion bentwood boxes out of single planks of cedar.
From "The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics" by Daniel James Brown
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.
