tuckahoe
See also Tuckahoe
English
Alternative forms
- tockwough [17th c.]
Etymology
From Powhatan tockawhoughe. The "person" sense implies that such a person was so poor as to be reduced to eating the root.
Pronunciation
Noun
tuckahoe (plural tuckahoes)
- Any edible root of a plant used by Native Americans of colonial-era Virginia
- 1624, John Smith, Generall Historie, in Kupperman 1988, p. 142:
- In June, July, and August, they feed upon the rootes of Tockwough berries, fish, and greene wheat.
- 1996, Karen Mueller Coombs, Sarah on Her Own:
- The ponderous beast had spent the summer eating tuckahoe roots, the autumn eating acorns and nuts, and was now as heavy as two stout men.
- The wild potato, the arrow arum, Peltandra virginica.
- 1624, John Smith, Generall Historie, in Kupperman 1988, p. 142:
- (uncommon, US, Virginia dialect, largely obsolete) A person, especially if poor and malnourished or implied to be, living east of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains.
- 1828 February 8, "Tusgarora" (pen name), in a letter to the editor of The American Farmer, page 372:
- […] at least until you either get poor Tuckahoe out of his present hobble, in furnishing so many strong suspicions against the sincerity of his former professions of patriotism, […]
- 1963, Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, The Old South: the founding of American civilization, page 213:
- The poor Tuckahoe, however, when he purchased land in Washington County, or the Shenandoah, or in Rowan, seems to have left behind him, not only his worn-out fields and his tumbledown house, but his wasteful methods
- 1828 February 8, "Tusgarora" (pen name), in a letter to the editor of The American Farmer, page 372:
- The sclerotium of a fungus, Wolfiporia extensa, used as food and herbal medicine.