Etymology of Manhattan

"Manhattan", first entering the colonial record in 1609, is one of the oldest indigenous place names still extant in the United States. Manhattan bears a particularly prominent toponym as the island on which New York City was founded, and a metonym for the city's power and influence. Its exact etymology is uncertain, but undoubtedly has its roots in the Munsee language of Lenapehoking. Possible meanings include that it is derived from the Lenape term for "island" itself or of some modified phrase, or that pars pro toto it originally referred only to the island's southern point, named after a hickory grove there. It was also sometimes in the past been attributed as an ethnonym of a local Lenape group, but this is almost certainly mistaken.

Manhattoe/Manhattoes is a term describing a place and, mistakenly, a people. The location was the very southern tip of the Manhattan island during the time of the Dutch colonization of the Americas at what became New Amsterdam there. The people were a band of the Wappinger known as the Weckquaesgeek, native to an area further north in what is now Westchester County, who controlled the upper three-quarters of the island as a hunting ground.

As was common practice early in the days of European settlement of North America, a people came to be associated with a place, with its name displacing theirs among the settlers and those associated with them, such as explorers, mapmakers, trading company superiors who sponsored many of the early settlements, and officials in the settlers' mother country in Europe.

Because of this early conflation there is enduring confusion over whether "Manhattoe/Manhattoes" were a people or a place. There is certainty it was a place, at the very tip of Manhattan Island, so referred to by the Dutch, who evidently inherited the Native American name for the spot they chose to place their settlement (rather than named it after a people already living there, as the island was not permanently inhabited at the time of their 1609 arrival nor Peter Minuit's subsequent purchase of it from the Canarse Indians for 60 guilders in 1626).

Period accounts maintain that Manhattan island was used as a hunting ground by two tribes, the Canarse (Canarsee, or Canarsie) of today's Brooklyn at its southern one-quarter and the Weckquaesgeek the rest, each having no more than temporary camps for hunting parties.