Acadia

What Does the Name Acadia Mean?

Acadia is a place name, and its etymology is not settled. The explanation most often repeated connects it to Arcadia, the mountain region of ancient Greece whose name became a byword for an idealized, simple pastoral life. In that account the North American name is a worn-down or altered form of Arcadia, so its sense would be closer to "pastoral idyll" than to a literal translation. A rival explanation derives the name from a Mi'kmaq word, written variously as akadie or cadie and usually translated "place of abundance" or "fertile land," referring to the home region of the Mi'kmaq and other Wabanaki peoples. Neither derivation is documented well enough to be called certain, and the French colonial spelling Acadie, from which the English and Latin form Acadia comes, fits either story.

Acadia Name History & Origins

In European usage the name took the French form Acadie and was attached to the French colony on the northeastern coast of North America. Settlers founded Port-Royal on the Bay of Fundy in 1605, and over the next century the colony covered the area of present-day Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, along with parts of what are now Maine and Quebec. The Acadian population was French-speaking and largely Catholic, living alongside the Mi'kmaq and other Indigenous nations. Some accounts trace the label itself to a 16th-century Italian map based on the voyages of Giovanni da Verrazzano, but that connection is not firmly established.

British control of the region was recognized by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, and in 1755 British authorities began the deportation of the Acadians, remembered as the Great Expulsion or le Grand Dérangement. Thousands were driven from their lands; many eventually settled in Louisiana, where Acadien shortened to "Cajun," while others returned to the Maritime colonies or settled in Quebec and New England.

In the 19th century the name and the history behind it reached a wide English-reading public through Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1847 poem Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie, which took the expulsion as its subject. That was a literary use of a name already centuries old, not its origin.

The place name also survives in Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island in Maine, first protected as Sieur de Monts National Monument in 1916, renamed Lafayette National Park in 1919, and given the name Acadia in 1929. Acadia is used as a feminine given name in the United States, taken from the historical region and its park rather than from an older personal name.