Oneida
/əʊˈnʌɪdə
/noun (plural same or Oneidas)
1A member of an American Indian people formerly inhabiting upper New York State, one of the five peoples comprising the original Iroquois confederacy.The Oneidas are members of the Iroquois Confederacy, also known as the League of the Haudenosaunee, or Six Nations....
- Hofstra begins by recalling a violent skirmish in 1742 on the Virginia frontier between white settlers and a group of Oneidas and Onondagas traveling from their homelands in New York to the Carolinas.
- Directly after the battle at Lake George, the Mohawks and Oneidas left for home to console their families and did not return as promised.
2 [mass noun] The extinct Iroquoian language of the Oneida.An Iroquoian language, Oneida is most closely related to Mohawk....
- The Cherokee language belongs to the Iroquoian family of languages and is therefore related to Mohawk, Seneca, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Tuscarora, among others.
- I taught them the names of the Six Nations, and the meaning of Onondaga, Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, Tuscarora and Oneida.
adjective
Relating to the Oneida or their language.Johnson's army, on the other hand, was composed primarily of New England militia men, Mohawk and Oneida Indians, and almost no British regulars....
- Born in Oneida, Wisc., an indeterminate number of years ago, to an Oneida father and a Cree mother from Alberta, Hill is able to call both sides of the border his home.
- After the death of his first wife, Margaret, daughter of the Oneida sachem Skenandoah, Brant married Catherine Croghan, the Mohawk daughter of a British agent.
Origin
From a local word meaning 'erected stone', the name of successive principal Oneida settlements, near which, by tradition, a large syenite boulder was erected.