Word-building: Understanding Passamaquoddy-Maliseet Words

The list below provides links to short video clips in which a specific Passamaquoddy-Maliseet word is broken down to reveal its meaningful parts.

Passamaquoddy-Maliseet words are built from small, meaningful units. Taken together, these units give the word its overall meaning. This is especially true of verbs, which make up the majority of dictionary entries.

To find words related to the ones shown, users can type just one of the meaningful parts (for example, atok “string-like” or ewep “up”) into the Entry field of the Advanced Search page. This will generate a list that includes related words using the same unit. (Note: There may also be words in the list that coincidentally contain the same sequence of letters, but with a different meaning.)