rancheria
rancheria noun: a small settlement in the Americas, especially of Native Americans.
Noun
rancheria (plural rancherias)
- A small settlement in the Americas, especially of Native Americans.
- The springs are so few in number that their names are household words in every Indian rancheria and every settler's home; and there are no brooks, no creeks, and no rivers but the trunk of the Colorado and the trunk of the Gila.1895, J[ohn] W[esley] Powell, chapter I, in Canyons of the Colorado, Meadville, PA: Flood & Vincent; republished as The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons, New York: Dover, 1961...
- As for escaping, there were eight hundred miles of dry wilderness between the ranchería and civilization.2013, Philipp Meyer, The Son, Simon & Schuster, published 2014, page 98
- A political division denoting a small poor rural settlement.
Forms of rancheria
| plural | rancherias |
|---|---|
| alternative form | ranchería |
| alternative form | rancherio |
Origin of rancheria
Borrowed from Spanish ranchería. Doublet of rancherie.
Questions about rancheria
- What does rancheria mean?
- Rancheria means a small settlement in the Americas, especially of Native Americans.
- What part of speech is rancheria?
- Rancheria is a noun.
- What is the plural of rancheria?
- The plural of rancheria is rancherias.
Words near rancheria in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: rancheria (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: “rancheria.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/rancheria. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
