Word.ws English Dictionary

shawnee

UK/ʃɔˈni//ʃɑˈni/

shawnee noun: virginia waterleaf (Hydrophyllum virginianum).

Noun (1)

shawnee (uncountable)

  1. Virginia waterleaf (Hydrophyllum virginianum)

Noun (2) capitalized: Shawnee

Shawnee (plural Shawnees or Shawnee)

  1. A member of a Native American people (tribe) from Ohio.

Adjective capitalized: Shawnee

Shawnee (not comparable)

  1. Of, belonging to, or pertaining to this tribe.

Proper noun capitalized: Shawnee

Shawnee

  1. The language of this tribe.
  2. A female given name, derived from the name of this tribe.
    • The girls from our year were mainly named some version of Shawn. There was Shawna, Dawna, Shawnee, Dawnali, Shalana, and just plain Dawn and Shawn.2012, Louise Erdrich, The Round House, Corsair, published 2013, →ISBN, page 292
  3. A city, the county seat of Pottawatomie County, Oklahoma, United States.

Forms of shawnee

pluralShawnees
pluralShawnee

Origin of shawnee

Ultimately from Shawnee saawanwa (“Shawnee”) or saawanoki (“southerners”), a hypothetical intermediary term is sometimes supposed to have facilitated the entry into English, such as Munsee sawanow. Likely a re-analysis of Shawnese as the plural Shawnees.

Words formed from shawnee

Questions about shawnee

What does shawnee mean?
Shawnee means virginia waterleaf (Hydrophyllum virginianum).
What part of speech is shawnee?
Shawnee can be a noun, an adjective or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce shawnee?
Shawnee is pronounced /ʃɑˈni/ (US).
What is the plural of shawnee?
The plural of shawnee is Shawnees.

Words near shawnee in the dictionary

  1. shawmist
  2. shawmists
  3. shawms
  4. Shawn
  5. Shawna
  6. shawnee
  7. Shawnee County
  8. Shawneece
  9. Shawnees
  10. Shawneetown
  11. Shawnese

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shawnee (page history and authors); Shawnee (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-Shawnee.wav.

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