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��THE ADOPTED ALGONQUIAN TERM "POQUOSIN" 1

By WILLIAM WALLACE TOOKER

Among our numerous adopted Indian words the subject of this essay survives in local parlance in some parts of the Carolinas, Virginia, and Maryland, as a topographical term for low lands or marshes. Its lexicographical variations are pocoson, Worcester (1846); pocoson, or poquoson, Bart let t (1859); pocosan, De Vera (1872); pocosin, in the Century Dictionary, and pocoson and po- quoson, in the Standard Dictionary. As it is surely time for i lexicographers to agree on some standard spelling, we have se-

lected ' poquosin ' — a form more generally prevailing in print and representing more clearly the original phraseology — as the proper spelling.

These swamps, wrote the late Prof. J. D. Whitney,* "are

locally known as ' dismals* and also as ' pocosins, the latter word

being apparently an aboriginal name, and, if so, one of the very

few instances (if not the only one) in which a word of this kind

has become — to a limited extent, it is true — generalized as a

topographical designation."

• Mr W. G. Stanard, who has devoted much study to the land

j patents and other records of Virginia, writes*: " Poquoson is an

! Indian word meaning marsh or low ground. There is frequent


 * ,; mention in the patents of land being bounded by, or being in

j j part a ' poquoson' Not long ago a North Carolina paper referred

i 1 to the ' poquoson lands ' on the Roanoke."

' I — "~" '

J ' x The writer must acknowledge his indebtedness to Albert Matthews, Esq., of

I 1 Boston, for collating the extracts relating to the use of the word * poquosin* without

I i which this paper probably would not have been written. If those desirous of learning

t the meaning of our early Algonquian place-names would be as thorough in their search

) j for early forms as Mr Matthews has been in this instance, there would be less

difficulty in tracing their etymology.

• Names and Places, 1888, p. 211.


 * Virginia Mag, of Hist, and Biog. y vol. IV, 1896, p. 202.

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