Manhattoe/Manhattoes is a term describing a place and, mistakenly, a people. The location was the very southern tip of the Manhattan island during the time of the Dutch colonization of the Americas at what became New Amsterdam there. The people were a band of the Wappinger known as the Weckquaesgeek, native to an area further north in what is now Westchester County, who controlled the upper three-quarters of the island as a hunting ground.

As was common practice early in the days of European settlement of North America, a people came to be associated with a place, with its name displacing theirs among the settlers and those associated with them, such as explorers, mapmakers, trading company superiors who sponsored many of the early settlements, and officials in the settlers' mother country in Europe.

Because of this early conflation there is enduring confusion over whether "Manhattoe/Manhattoes" were a people or a place. There is certainty it was a place, at the very tip of Manhattan Island, so referred to by the Dutch, who evidently inherited the Native American name for the spot they chose to place their settlement (rather than named it after a people already living there, as the island was not permanently inhabited at the time of their 1609 arrival nor Peter Minuit's subsequent purchase of it from the Canarse Indians for $24 in 1639).

Period accounts maintain that Manhattan island was used as a hunting ground by two tribes, the Canarse (Canarsee, or Canarsie) of today's Brooklyn at its southern one-quarter and the Weckquaesgeek the rest, each having no more than temporary camps for hunting parties.

From Manna-hata, as written in the 1609 logbook of Robert Juet, an officer on Henry Hudson's ship Halve Maen (Half Moon), published in the English travelogue collection of Samuel Purchas. The Velasco Map, dated 1610, depicts the name doubleted, Manahata on the west side, and Manahatin on the east side of the Mauritius River (later named the Hudson River), though its authenticity has been questioned. This plurality appears in many colonial Dutch writings, which often refer to "the Manhattans" or similar.

Scholarship generally supports one of two possible meanings for Manna-hata — either a variation on the Lenape term for "island" (similar to Manhasset, New York on Long Island), or to the Lenape term designating the southernmost point of the island, said to have been the site of hickory trees.

The word "Manhattan" has been translated as island of many hills. The Encyclopedia of New York City offers other derivations, including from the Munsee dialect of Lenape: manahachtanienk ("place of general inebriation"), manahatouh ("place where timber is procured for bows and arrows"), or menatay ("island").

The name Manhattan most likely originated, via loaning by Dutch, from the Lenape's local language Munsee, manaháhtaan (where manah- means "gather", -aht- means "bow", and -aan is an abstract element used to form verb stems). The Lenape word has been translated as "the place where we get bows" or "place for gathering the (wood to make) bows". According to a Munsee tradition recorded by Albert Seqaqkind Anthony in the 19th century, the island was named so for a grove of hickory trees at its southern end that was considered ideal for the making of bows. An alternate theory claims a "Delaware source akin to Munsee munahan ("island")." Nora Thompson Dean (Touching Leaves Woman) defined it as: 'place that is an island', from Lenape Menating. The common poetic rendering in American verse is "Mannahatta", originating perhaps in Washington Irving's Knickerbocker's History (with one "t") and popularized by Walt Whitman (with two "t"s).