- 1
Wampum is small beads made from shells, threaded onto strings or worked into belts, made and used by Native American peoples of the north-east of North America. English books usually explain it as "money", and that is only half true, which matters. Europeans arriving in the 1600s treated wampum as money and with it, and for a while it really was used as money in the colonies. But for the peoples who made it, wampum was not mainly for buying things. A wampum belt was a record and a promise: the pattern of the beads held an agreement, a treaty, a piece of history, and belts were given to mark peace, to carry a message, or to remember someone who had died. So calling it "Indian money" is a European way of seeing it. The word is uncountable — you say "some wampum", not "a wampum" or "wampums". It is mostly a history word now. In old American slang it was also used jokingly to mean money in general, but that use sounds dated and can come across as making light of another people's culture, so leave it alone.
貝殼串珠（北美原住民所製的貝珠串或貝珠帶，兼作交易媒介與紀錄、盟約信物）
組成A short form of wampumpeag, which English took from Massachusett wampompeage, meaning a string of white beads. English speakers cut the long word down to its first part — the same habit that gives us "phone" from "telephone".
原始詞典資料3 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
wampumnoun/ˈwɒmpəm/
- 1
Small cylindrical beads made from polished shells (especially white ones) which have been strung together, formerly used by Native American peoples of eastern North America for various purposes including as jewellery and money, and for record-keeping; (countable, archaic) one such bead.
- [A]mong the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of honor; […]
- From his lodge went Hiawatha, / Dressed for travel, armed for hunting; / Dressed in deer-skin shirt and leggings, / Richly wrought with quills and wampum; / On his head his eagle-feathers, / Round his waist his belt of wampum, […]
- 2
slangMoney.
- [Kenneth O'Keefe, letter] Have that seven quid. Or else I'll be kaput. […] [Sebastian Dangerfield, letter in reply] Kenneth, we all want wampum. And as you must know, if only I had some I would be only too willing to share. But the only thing I have here is a pile of business magazines which I am going to burn for a fire.
- [M]ore and more people in the folk world suddenly discovered there was more than a little wampum to be made by discovering a trace of Indian blood in their past and donning the traditional headband.
這個拼法也被記錄為下列字的變化形：
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。