A sequoia is a huge tree of the western United States, above all California. Some of these trees are among the tallest living things on earth, and a close kind (often called the giant sequoia) is among the heaviest. In everyday English people are a little loose with the name: they may say sequoia for the tall coast redwood, for the massive giant sequoia, or for both, as if all those famous California giants were one thing. Science splits the names more neatly. You will meet the word in nature films, park names, and in a slightly bookish way to mean something very old and very tall. It is not cafe talk. English took it as a learned borrowing of the Latin science name Sequoia. Many schoolbooks say that name honours Sequoyah, the Cherokee man; the botanist who chose the Latin name never wrote down why, so that story is popular, not proven.