or Canuck, Kanuck, K’nuck, subs. (American).—A Canadian, usually a K’NUCK. [Obscure, and limited in its application within the Canadian frontier. There, a CANUCK is understood to be a French Canadian, just as within the limits of the Union only New Englanders are termed Yankees; whereas elsewhere that appellation is given indiscriminately to natives of all the States. It is by some supposed that CANUCK is a corruption of Connaught, the name applied by French-Canadians to the Irish, from which it would follow that, by a process of inversion, a nickname given by one section of a nation to another has, in course of time, been applied to the whole. Others, however, think the first syllable of ‘Canada’ has been joined to the Algonkin Indian substantive termination uc or uq.]
