trail of tears
trail of tears noun: a forced removal of American Indian or First Nation peoples, or other alleged injustice against them, like the original Trail of Tears.
Noun
trail of tears (plural trails of tears)
- A forced removal of American Indian or First Nation peoples, or other alleged injustice against them, like the original Trail of Tears.
Proper noun capitalized: Trail of Tears
the Trail of Tears
- The route followed by American Indians moved from their homelands in the southeastern United States to lands west of the Mississippi river by the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
Forms of trail of tears
| plural | trails of tears |
|---|
Origin of trail of tears
First originated from a Choctaw chief who described the displacement, quoted in the Arkansas Gazette as a "trail of tears and death". Later popularised in reference to the Cherokees, where it is called ᏅᏃᎯ ᏚᎾᏠᏱᎸᎢ (nvnohi dunatloyilvi, literally “the trail where they cried”) in the Cherokee language.
Questions about trail of tears
- What does trail of tears mean?
- Trail of tears means a forced removal of American Indian or First Nation peoples, or other alleged injustice against them, like the original Trail of Tears.
- What part of speech is trail of tears?
- Trail of tears can be a noun or a proper noun.
- What is the plural of trail of tears?
- The plural of trail of tears is trails of tears.
Words near trail of tears in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: trail of tears (page history and authors); Trail of Tears (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: “trail of tears.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/trail_of_tears. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.