Ohlone

noun

Oh·​lo·​ne ə-ˈlō-nē  ō-ˈlō-(ˌ)nā 

plural Ohlone or Ohlones

1

: a member of any of a group of Indigenous peoples who before European contact lived in coastal California from San Francisco and San Pablo bays south to near Point Sur and east into the Coast Ranges

2

: the family of languages spoken by the Ohlone peoples

Examples of Ohlone in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

The episode happened between midnight and 1:30 a.m. on May 18 on the Ohlone Greenway, between Hill Street and Blake Street, according to the El Cerrito Police Department. —Jason Green, Mercury News, 14 Aug. 2025

The land’s legacy is deep, belonging to the Ohlone Lamchin people, and later a part of the Rancho Cañada de Raymundo land grant, according to Compass. —David Caraccio, Sacbee.com, 19 May 2025

The Ohlone tribe of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust opened the festivities with a ritual dance performance as part of the Ohlone Land dedication on the field before the start of the game. —Ray Chavez, The Mercury News, 23 Mar. 2025

Originally the land of the Ohlone people indigenous to the San Francisco Bay Area, the island was named La Isla de las Alcatraces after its large pelicans that a Spanish Navy officer who arrived in 1775 thought were gannets, called alactraces in Spanish. —Miranda Jeyaretnam, Time, 16 May 2024

Word History

Etymology

extracted from plural Ohlones, variant spelling of earlier Olhones, borrowed from California Spanish oljones, plural, based on Ramaytush (a dialect of San Francisco Bay Ohlone/Costanoan) ʔolxon, name of a village near San Gregorio Creek in present-day San Mateo County, California

Note: The name Ohlone is probably first documented in print by the British naval officer Frederick W. Beechey, who mentions "the Olchone, who inhabit the seacoast between San Francisco and Monterey" (Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Bering's Strait, Part II, London, 1831, p. 402); on page 400 he refers to presumably the same people as "Alchones." The next occurrence is apparently in Henry Schoolcraft's Information Respecting the History, Conditions and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States, Part II (Philadelphia, 1852), p. 506, in a note to a vocabulary of the "Costanos - California." The note, under the heading "Costanos," states that "the tribes of Indians upon the Bay of San Francisco, and who were, after its establishment, under the supervision of the mission of Dolores [an alternate name of Misión San Francisco de Assís], were five in number: the Ah-wash-tes, Ol-hones, (called, in Spanish, Costanos, or Indians of the Coast), Al-tah-mos, Ro-mo-nans, and Tu-lo-mos." The note and vocabulary, said to have been obtained "from an aged Indian at the mission of Dolores, named Pedro Alcantara," are paired with a vocabulary of the Cushna, said to be living "on the mountains of the South [Fork of the] Yuba [River]." The Cushna vocabulary is attributed in Schoolcraft's Information, below the heading "Cushna (Sacramento R.)" at the head of the list, to "Johnson, U.S. Agt." This individual was Adam Johnston, appointed federal "Indian subagent" on the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers on April 14, 1849, and dismissed on January 19, 1852 (see W.H. Ellison, "The Federal Indian Policy in California, 1846-1860," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 9, no. 1, June, 1922, pp. 37-67).

Both the "Costanos" list and the "Cushna" list have been attributed to Johnston by Victor Golla (California Indian Languages, Berkeley, 2011, pp. 164-65) and by Randall Milliken, et al., Ohlone/Costanoan Indians of the San Francisco Peninsula and Their Neighbors, Yesterday and Today (Oakland, 2009), p 23. Johnston's contributions elsewhere in Schoolcraft's Information focus solely on Central Valley peoples ("The California Indians—Their Manners, Customs, and History," part IV, 1854, pp. 221-26; "Languages of California," ibid., pp. 406-15; "Indian Tribes, or Bands, of the Sacramento Valley, California," part VI, 1857, p. 710), so his authorship of the "Costanos" vocabulary, which is not directly attributed to him, might be questioned. However, a letter of September 16, 1850, from Johnston to Orlando Brown, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (online at the Los Angeles County Library Digital Collections) mentions his "interview with a very aged Indian near the mission of Dolores" (presumably carried out with a Spanish interpreter) who was most likely Pedro Alcantara. The spelling Ohlone was introduced in an article in the California Farmer newspaper (vol. 15, no. 14, May 31, 1861, p. 106) by Alexander S. Taylor, either as a miscopying of Olhone from Schoolcraft or as a typesetting error. Milliken, et al., document the further use of the word in detail (pp. 42-46). Interestingly, Taylor included the name Oljon in a list of native "rancherias" (indigenous villages) recorded in the baptismal registry of the Dolores mission (California Farmer, vol. 16, no. 6, October 18, 1861, p. 36). The name Olhonean was used by the ethnographer C. Hart Merriam as an alternative to Costanoan in reference to the language family.

First Known Use

1831, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Rhymes for Ohlone

• alone
• atone
• backbone
• bemoan
• bluestone
• breastbone
• brownstone
• capstone
• cheekbone
• condone
• curbstone
• cyclone