Word.ws English Dictionary

Oriskany

Syllables: Oris·ka·nyUK/əˈɹɪskəni/

Oriskany proper noun: a village in Oneida County, New York, United States.

Proper noun

Oriskany

  1. A village in Oneida County, New York, United States.
  2. An unincorporated community in Botetourt County, Virginia, United States.

Origin of Oriskany

Said to be from Iroquoian (“place of nettles”). According to folk etymology, the naming of the town was due to a typographical error on the address label of an envelope. The 1777 Battle of Oriskany during the American Revolution was fought west of the location of the modern village, near an Oneida village called Oriska. It has been suggested that the modern village, founded in 1811, was also originally named Oriska, but became Oriskany after an envelope marked “Oriska NY” was misinterpreted. However, this is highly unlikely due to the existence of 18th-century documents using the name Oriskany which predate the founding of the local post office by decades.

Words formed from Oriskany

Questions about Oriskany

What does Oriskany mean?
Oriskany means a village in Oneida County, New York, United States.
What part of speech is Oriskany?
Oriskany is a proper noun.
How do you pronounce Oriskany?
Oriskany is pronounced /əˈɹɪskəni/ (UK).

Words near Oriskany in the dictionary

  1. orisci
  2. oriscus
  3. orisha
  4. orishas
  5. Oriska
  6. Oriskany
  7. Oriskany Falls
  8. Orislav
  9. orismological
  10. orismologist
  11. orismologists

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Oriskany (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “Oriskany.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/oriskany. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.