The word  is an Algonquian word referring to a village at a big river. It is the seventh-oldest surviving English placename in the United States, first applied as Chesepiook by explorers heading north from the Roanoke Colony into a Chesapeake tributary in 1585 or 1586. The name may also refer to the Chesapeake people or the Chesepian, a Native American tribe who inhabited the area now known as South Hampton Roads in the U.S. state of Virginia. They occupied an area that is now the Norfolk, Portsmouth, Chesapeake, and Virginia Beach areas. In 2005, Algonquian linguist Blair Rudes "helped to dispel one of the areas most widely held beliefs: that Chesapeake means something like great shellfish bay. It does not, Rudes said. The name might have actually meant something like great water, or it might have just referred to a village location at the Bays mouth."