Word.ws English Dictionary

cigar store Indian

cigar store Indian noun: a sculpture, typically wooden and painted, of a Native American Indian, of the sort prominently used in tobacco stores.

cigar store indian: a sculpture, typically wooden and painted, of a Native American Indian, of the sort prominently...
Image: Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

cigar store Indian (plural cigar store Indians)

  1. (US) A sculpture, typically wooden and painted, of a Native American Indian, of the sort prominently used in tobacco stores.
    • ... Fenimore Cooper's Indian is a fraud. ... The cigar-store red man and the statuesque Pocahontas of the "vuelta abajo" trade as they are paraded in literature and thus pervert the public conceptions of our Indians, THEY—I want to destroy first if possible.1888, Adolph F. Bandelier, “Letter to Thomas Janvier”, in Charles H. Lange, Carroll L. Riley, Elizabeth M. Lange, editors, The Southwestern Journals of Adolph F. Bandelier, 1889-1892, volume 4...
    • "Do you think I'm going to stand here on one foot all night like a dodgasted cigar store Indian?"1912 Dec, Modern Electrics, page 913, column 2

Forms of cigar store Indian

pluralcigar store Indians
alternative formcigar-store Indian

Origin of cigar store Indian

From the once common use of sculpted wooden Indians as a symbol for tobacco selling.

Questions about cigar store Indian

What does cigar store Indian mean?
Cigar store Indian means a sculpture, typically wooden and painted, of a Native American Indian, of the sort prominently used in tobacco stores.
What part of speech is cigar store Indian?
Cigar store Indian is a noun.
What is the plural of cigar store Indian?
The plural of cigar store Indian is cigar store Indians.

Words near cigar store Indian in the dictionary

  1. cigar cutters
  2. cigar jellyfish
  3. cigar lighter
  4. cigar lighters
  5. cigar smoke
  6. cigar store Indian
  7. cigar store Indians
  8. cigar tree
  9. cigar trees
  10. cigar-box
  11. cigar-box guitar

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cigar store Indian (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “cigar store Indian.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cigar_store_indian. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.