moccasin
Americannoun
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a heelless shoe made entirely of soft leather, as deerskin, with the sole brought up and attached to a piece of u -shaped leather on top of the foot, worn originally by the American Indians.
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a hard-soled shoe or slipper resembling this, often decorated with beads.
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any of several North American snakes of the genus Agkistrodon (Ancistrodon ), especially the cottonmouth.
noun
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a shoe of soft leather, esp deerskin, worn by North American Indians
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any soft shoe resembling this
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a sheepshearer's footgear, usually made of sacking
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short for water moccasin
Etymology
Origin of moccasin
1605–15, < Virginia Algonquian < Proto-Algonquian *maxkeseni
Compare meaning
How does moccasin compare to similar and commonly confused words? Explore the most common comparisons:
Explanation
If you lose a moccasin on your way to work, it means you'll be walking around with only one shoe all day. A moccasin is a soft leather slip-on shoe. Virginian Algonquins get credit for the word moccasin, though a relative of it existed in other American Indian languages to designate a leather shoe so elegant in design that it's now known around the world. Less well known, perhaps, is the correct spelling, which you see here. Everyone seems to know there's a double letter but fewer remember that it's the c, not the s.
Vocabulary lists containing moccasin
Native American History - Introductory
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Native American History - Middle School and High School
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"Stone Fox" by John Reynolds Gardiner
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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.
A water moccasin may glide silently past, and a few times we’ve seen iridescent alligator eyes peering out at us before they sank back down into the depths.
From Los Angeles Times • Feb. 2, 2023
Her team then checked this in a variety of snakes - dissecting a total of nine species including the carpet python, puff adder and Mexican moccasin.
From BBC • Dec. 14, 2022
“He was kind of a grumpy snake, and everybody was going, ‘Omigod, omigod, it's a water moccasin, kill it!’” she recollects.
From Scientific American • Sep. 18, 2022
He and his brother gave their father, who had been wiped out, $20,000 each from their trust funds to start a new business: importing shoes, in particular a moccasin, from Brazil.
From New York Times • Jul. 2, 2022
A water moccasin swam past, a dark head trailing a V-shaped ripple.
From "Out of Darkness" by Ashley Hope Pérez
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.
