ärähkun

When English colonists arrived in Virginia in 1607, they encountered an animal they'd never seen: a clever, masked creature that appeared to wash its food before eating. The Powhatan people—an Algonquian-speaking confederacy—called it ärähkun or aroughcun, meaning 'one who scratches with its hands.'

Captain John Smith recorded the word in 1608, spelling it variously as aroughcun and raugroughcun. The colonists couldn't quite capture the Algonquian sounds in English letters, and the word was squeezed and shortened over decades until it became raccoon by the mid-1600s.

The Powhatan language—part of the Virginia Algonquian family—is now extinct. The people who named the raccoon were devastated by disease, war, and displacement within a century of English contact. But their word survived, embedded in a language that helped destroy theirs.

Raccoon is one of hundreds of English words borrowed from Algonquian languages—alongside moose, skunk, opossum, moccasin, and tomahawk. These words are often the only surviving traces of languages that were spoken for thousands of years before European contact.