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.
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
Elsewhere, Naylor’s sister slipped in the mud and down into a makeshift privy, ruining her prized moccasin boots.
From Reuters • Aug. 13, 2019
The look was L.A. vagabond, mismatched print kimonos, board shorts, sweater pants, Baja hoodies, patchwork bucket hats and fringed moccasin booties.
From Los Angeles Times • Sep. 11, 2015
He remembered Gramps’s most terrifying Betsy story, about one of his friends who’d been bitten by a water moccasin while making his way through the flooded streets.
From "I Survived Hurricane Katrina, 2005" by Lauren Tarshis
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.
