Mississippi

originally the name of the river, from the French rendering of an Algonquian name (French missionaries first penetrated the river valley in its upper reaches) meaning "big river;" compare Ojibwa mshi- "big," ziibi "river." Organized as a U.S. territory 1798; admitted as a state 1817. Related: Mississippian (by 1775; as a geological period, by 1891).

Trends of Mississippi

adapted from books.google.com/ngrams/. Ngrams are probably unreliable.

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southwest

In U.S. use by 1835 (in reference to Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana). Related: Southwestward; southwesterly....

cremation

["Mark Twain," "Life on the Mississippi," 1883]...

Plains

This region has a gradual slope from the mountains to the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, but is nowhere broken by any conspicuous...

cut-off

Sense of "new and shorter channel formed on a river" (especially the Mississippi) is from 1773; of road that cut off or shorten...

lagniappe

["Mark Twain," "Life on the Mississippi," 1883]...

Indian summer

eastern Canada), perhaps so called because it was first noted in regions then still inhabited by Indians, in the upper Mississippi...

mound

Mound-builder "one of the prehistoric race of the Mississippi Valley that erected extensive earthworks" is by 1838....

Old English us (cognate with Old Saxon, Old Frisian us, Old Norse, Swedish oss, Dutch ons, German uns), accusative and dative plural of we, from PIE *nes- (2), forming oblique cases of the first person plural personal pronoun (source also of Sanskrit nas, Avestan na, Hittite nash

confederacy

late 14c., "contract between two or more persons, states, etc., for mutual support or joint action," from Anglo-French confederacie (Old French confederacie), from stem of Latin confoederare "to unite by a league," from assimilated form of com "with, together" (see con-) + foeder

America

1507, "the western hemisphere, North and South America," in Cartographer Martin Waldseemüller's treatise "Cosmographiae Introductio," from Modern Latin Americanus, traditionally after Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512) who made two trips to the New World as a navigator and claimed to h

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updated on February 02, 2019

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