Word.ws English Dictionary

Turtle Island

Turtle Island proper noun: north America.

Proper noun

Turtle Island

  1. North America.
    • If dispossession has defined recent centuries of Turtle Island history, then this fact has been well accommodated in official U.S. discourse.1992, Gordon Brotherston, Book of the Fourth World: Reading the Native Americas Through Their Literature, CUP Archive, →ISBN, page 174
    • Native peoples see the continent as Turtle Island (a concept brought to a wider audience by ecospirit poetry of Gary Snyder). The continental Turtle can be seen in two ways, with its head either to the north or south.1999, Peter William Champoux, William Stuart Buehler, Gaia Matrix: Arkhom and the Geometries of Destiny in the North American Landscape, Gaia Matrix, →ISBN, page 62
  2. The Earth.

Examples of Turtle Island in a sentence

  • Tears had flowed with the tide of settlers all the way to the western shores of Turtle Island.2003, Sheila Seclearr, A Tree on Turtle Island, PageFree Publishing, Inc., →ISBN, page 250:
  • For me, Cherokee Stories of the Turtle Island Liars' Club represents a coming together of the concerns of my published work as a scholar and my personal journey home to learn from my elders.2012, Christopher B. Teuton, Cherokee Stories of the Turtle Island Liars’ Club, UNC Press Books, →ISBN, page 3:

Origin of Turtle Island

From turtle + island, based on the role of a turtle's back acting as the base for the world while being surrounded by water in the creation stories of multiple tribes of the Northeastern Woodlands region of North America as well as Algonquian- and Iroquoian-speaking peoples. Specific groups with such myths include the Lenape people, the Haudenosaunee, the Ojibwe people, and the Cree.

Words formed from Turtle Island

Questions about Turtle Island

What does Turtle Island mean?
Turtle Island means north America.
How do you use Turtle Island in a sentence?
Tears had flowed with the tide of settlers all the way to the western shores of Turtle Island.
What part of speech is Turtle Island?
Turtle Island is a proper noun.

Words near Turtle Island in the dictionary

  1. turtle graphics
  2. turtle head
  3. turtle heading
  4. turtle hull
  5. turtle hulls
  6. Turtle Island
  7. Turtle Islander
  8. Turtle Islanders
  9. Turtle Islands
  10. turtle leech
  11. turtle leeches

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Turtle Island (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: “Turtle Island.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/turtle_island. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.