Paumanok

English

Etymology

From an Algonquian name for the area.[1] First recorded on May 3, 1639, in a deed between Lion Gardiner and "Yovawan, Sachem of Pommanocc".[2][3] Thereafter variously spelled Pamunke (1648), Pammanack (1656), Pawmanack (1658), Paumanuck and Paumanche (1659), and Pommanock (1665),[3] and later Paumanack and Pomonok (preserved as the name of a neighborhood in Flushing in Queens); and then popularized in the spelling Paumanok by Walt Whitman.[2][1] The precise origin of the name is not entirely clear,[1] but the source language has been suggested to be Lenape (Munsee),[4] and the first element has been suggested to be related to Massachusett pummunnum (“s/he gives away; offers, devotes”), paumpaummunum (“s/he offers it habitually or by custom”), and Narragansett pummenum- (“contribute”), with the final element probably a locative, making the name "land of tribute" (which had to pay tribute, or where wampum shells for paying tribute were obtained).[3][5]

Proper noun

Paumanok

  1. (poetic) Long Island.

References
  1. William Bright, Native American Placenames of the United States (2004), page 373
  2. Robert S. Grumet, Manhattan to Minisink: American Indian Place Names of Greater New York and Vicinity (2013, University of Oklahoma Press, →ISBN), page 227
  3. "The Aboriginal terms for Long Island", The Archaeologist (1894), volume 2, page 175
  4. Joan D. Berbrich, Three Voices from Paumanok (1969), page 192
  5. Evan T. Pritchard, Native New Yorkers (2019), chapter 16
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