Eskimo
Concise Oxford English Dictionary © 2008 Oxford University Press:
Eskimo/ˈeskɪməʊ/
▶noun (pl. same or Eskimos)
- 1 a member of an indigenous people inhabiting northern Canada, Alaska, Greenland, and eastern Siberia.
- 2 either of the two main languages of the Eskimo (Inuit and Yupik), comprising a major division of the Eskimo-Aleut family.
– origin an Algonquian word, perh. in the sense ‘people speaking a different language’.
usage: In recent years, the word Eskimo has come to be regarded by some as offensive: the peoples inhabiting the regions from NW Canada to western Greenland prefer to call themselves Inuit. The term Eskimo, however, continues to be the only term which can be properly understood as applying to the people as a whole and is still widely used in anthropological and archaeological contexts.
'Eskimo' also found in these Oxford entries:
