A French dress on an English page
Esquimau is an old English spelling of the name that later settled as Eskimo. Older books kept the French look in the singular and often used Esquimaux or Esquimaus in the plural. The word named Arctic Indigenous peoples of Greenland, northern Canada, Alaska, and eastern Siberia — peoples who today more often use their own names: Inuit, Iñupiat, Yupik, Kalaallit, and others. The letters themselves give the first clue. English did not mint this label. It copied a French form, and behind that a Spanish one, of an Algonquian word that Arctic peoples never used of themselves.
The origin of the word esquimau is therefore a story about the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the languages of its shores, not about Inuktitut or Yupik.
Into English by way of fishermen and maps
The earliest English witness is Richard Hakluyt’s 1584 manuscript on western planting, which mentions Esquimawes of the Grande Bay. Grande Bay here is the Gulf of St. Lawrence, not Hudson Bay. Hakluyt had not seen the coast; he had been living in France, and Basque and Breton crews already fished and hunted whales in the Strait of Belle Isle. Spanish writing of the next generation records esquimaos as the people who attacked Basque whalers, set apart from the montañeses — the Innu — with whom the same crews traded.
French print is a little later. Samuel de Champlain places Esquimaux on a 1632 map along the north shore of the gulf. Seventeenth-century missionary prose used the name for more than one group: Inuit of Labrador, Mi’kmaq, and certain Innu bands on the mainland opposite Anticosti. Late in that century some writers tried to sort the overlap by splitting grands Esquimaux, meaning Inuit, from petits Esquimaux, meaning Innu of the Mingan country. The European word was already a cover term, applied by outsiders and stretched as trade and conflict moved along the shore.
English later took over the French singular Esquimau and, still later, the more fully anglicized Eskimo. Dictionaries often date the latter to the later seventeenth century. Spellings in between — Eskeimoes, Esquimos, Esquemoes — show a word still being heard rather than fixed. Danish Eskimo is sometimes listed as a parallel channel, but the English trail is Atlantic first: Spanish and French renderings of an Innu name, then English copies of those letters.
An Innu word, not an Inuit one
The source language is Innu-aimun, the Algonquian language of the Innu of Quebec and Labrador, long called Montagnais in French sources. Seventeenth-century records give forms such as aiachkimew. Modern analyses write ayassimew or ayaškimew. In dialects along the western gulf that word still names the Mi’kmaq; farther east and on the Labrador coast it came to name Inuit. Plains Cree ayaskimew and Attikamek ashkimew belong to the same set of names. Older etymologies also lined up Abenaki askimo and Ojibwe ashkimeq as related Algonquian shapes.
The literal sense is disputed, and the account that reached the general public is the one linguists have spent the most energy taking apart. From the eighteenth century onward, European writers treated the name as meaning eater of raw meat. That gloss matches real Ojibwe and Cree labels — eshkipot, ashkipok, askamiciw — which do contain a root for raw plus a verb of eating. Those words exist. They do not explain the Innu form that French and Spanish actually borrowed.
Ives Goddard, in the Arctic volume of the Smithsonian Handbook of North American Indians, argued that ayassimew is a reduplicated agent noun from Innu assimew, she nets or laces a snowshoe, with an Ojibwe cognate ashkime in the same technical sense. On that reading the first people so named were likely other Algonquians, the Mi’kmaq, and the label later slid north onto Inuit neighbors. José Mailhot, an anthropologist who speaks Innu-aimun, offered a different gloss in 1978: roughly a person who speaks a foreign language. That would also explain why one word could cover both Mi’kmaq and Inuit. Later overviews have not treated that analysis as proven. Etymological dictionaries still note phonological snags in the snowshoe reading. The fair summary is that the word is Innu, that the raw-meat story does not fit the source form, and that snowshoe-netter is the leading scholarly proposal rather than a closed case.
How the name narrowed, then receded
In English, esquimau never became the everyday spelling. Eskimo did. For two centuries that cover term lumped Inuit of Canada and Greenland with Yupik of Alaska and Siberia. The grouping is linguistically real — the Eskimo branch of Eskimo-Aleut — but politically blunt. Inuit means people, from singular inuk. Yupik and Iñupiat have their own formations on a root meaning person. None of those endonyms traveled into sixteenth-century French.
The move away from the old European name in the 1970s had two engines. One was the false but widely believed raw-meat etymology, which made the word sound like an insult even where historical texts do not record it as a slur. The other, stronger in Canada, was simply that it is an exonym imposed by traders and missionaries. The Inuit Circumpolar gathering at Barrow in 1977 adopted Inuit as the collective political name. Canadian public usage followed. In Alaska the picture is messier, because Yupik speakers are not Inuit, and no single native cover term matches the old European one. Many Alaska Native organizations now reject Eskimo as a colonial label even so.
French kept esquimau longer in everyday speech and also as the name of a chocolate-coated ice cream, a sense English mostly attached to the brand Eskimo Pie, later renamed. English esquimau survived mainly in nineteenth-century travel writing and in dictionary notes as an archaic variant.
What the dog kept
A small remnant of the same contact history sits in husky, the sled dog. Arctic English once used Husky as a clipped, rough form of the people-name; Danish sailors were said to call Arctic Inuit Huskies. The dog kept the nickname. The people-name in its French dress receded into the archive. What remains is the path: Innu speakers named neighbors, Basque and French crews wrote the name down, English copied the French letters, and a later generation of English writers smoothed those letters into Eskimo.