Etymology of Manhattan

The people were a band of the Wappinger known as the Weckquaesgeek, native to an area further north in what is now Westchester County, who controlled the upper three-quarters of the island as a hunting ground.

There is certainty it was a place, at the very tip of Manhattan Island, so referred to by the Dutch,[1][2] who evidently inherited the Native American name for the spot they chose to place their settlement (rather than named it after a people already living there, as the island was not permanently inhabited at the time of their 1609 arrival nor Peter Minuit's subsequent purchase of it from the Canarse Indians[3] for $24 in 1639).

From Manna-hata, as written in the 1609 logbook of Robert Juet, an officer on Henry Hudson's ship Halve Maen (Half Moon), published in the English travelogue collection of Samuel Purchas.

According to a Munsee tradition recorded by Albert Seqaqkind Anthony in the 19th century, the island was named so for a grove of hickory trees at its southern end that was considered ideal for the making of bows.

[10] The common poetic rendering in American verse is "Mannahatta", originating perhaps in Washington Irving's Knickerbocker's History (with one "t") and popularized by Walt Whitman (with two "t"s).

Manhattoe, also Manhattan, was a name erroneously given to a Native American people of the lower Hudson River, the Weckquaesgeek,[a] a Wappinger band which occupied the southwestern part of today's Westchester County.