Shoshone
Americannoun
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Shoshones,
plural
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Shoshone
plural
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a river in NW Wyoming, flowing NE into the Big Horn River. 120 miles (193 km) long.
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a member of any of several Numic-speaking peoples of California, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming.
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the language or languages of the Shoshone.
noun
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a member of a North American Indian people of the southwestern US, related to the Aztecs
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the language of this people, belonging to the Uto-Aztecan family
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of Shoshone
An Americanism dating back to 1805; < an Eastern Shoshone band name
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:
Others—including York, Clark’s enslaved manservant, and Sacagawea, a kidnapped Shoshone teenager pregnant with the child of the expedition’s interpreter, Charbonneau—did not have a say in the matter.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 16, 2026
Arguably the first collection of lyrical essay writing about the California desert, Austin drew on her travels through the Owens Valley and environs, covering mining, the Shoshone tribe, weather and water.
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 11, 2026
For the Southern Paiute and Western Shoshone, Eagle Mountain holds profound cultural significance — woven into their creation stories and Salt Songs, understood as a “passage to the sky.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 5, 2026
To choose the name, the research team, led by University of Utah biology professor Michael Werner, worked with the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation.
From Science Daily ● Jan. 10, 2026
With the Long Knives were three hundred Shoshone and Crow warriors.
From "In the Footsteps of Crazy Horse" by Joseph Marshall III
Once, he tells you, this was the land of the Shoshones.
From Salon ● Jun. 17, 2018
You have to ford numerous rivers, and the Shoshones, Pawnees and Sioux, were extremely adept at helping the pioneers make these fords.
From National Geographic ● Jul. 12, 2015
With unemployment on the reservation at 70 percent, the leases represent needed income for some of the 3,500 Eastern Shoshones and 9,600 Northern Arapahoes, he said.
From Reuters ● Dec. 20, 2011
At Lemhi Pass on the Continental Divide, they met Sacajawea's people, the Shoshones, who supplied them with horses and a guide.
From Time Magazine Archive
The Shoshones, Arapahoes, and Crows had forgotten their old animosities, and were traveling with Buffalo Bill, going to college, and raising alfalfa under the direction of a government farmer.
From The Rustler of Wind River by George W. (George Washington) Ogden
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Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
