Mohawk

How to spell mohawk

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce mohawk

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mohawk mean?

1. nounA hairstyle in which the head is shaved at the sides leaving a central strip of upright or spiked hair.

Mohawk in a sentence

• The barber shaved the sides to give him a sharp mohawk.

• She dyed her mohawk bright green for the festival.

Where does mohawk come from?

Language of origin: Other

The word comes from a name given to a Native American people of the Iroquois Confederacy who lived in what is now upstate New York. English picked it up in the 1600s from an Eastern Algonquian language, most likely a Narragansett term along the lines of mohowawog, which has been glossed as 'man-eaters' or 'those who eat living things', a hostile label applied by neighbouring tribes rather than the people's own name for themselves; they called themselves Kanien'keha:ka, meaning roughly 'people of the flint'. The English spelling settled on 'mohawk' as colonists wrote down the unfamiliar sounds by ear, which is why the ending is the slightly odd '-awk' rather than a more phonetic '-ock'. In the twentieth century the word also became the name of a distinctive hairstyle, with the head shaved at the sides and a strip of upright hair down the centre, after a stereotyped image of the warriors' grooming. The hairstyle sense made the word an everyday term, and the unstressed second syllable is exactly where writers hesitate over how the '-awk' is spelled.

How the word is built

• mohawk (single root; an anglicised form of an Eastern Algonquian name for the people)