Acre (state) - Etymology

Etymology

The name, which passed from the river to the territory in 1904, and to the state in 1962, perhaps originates from the tupi word a'kir ü "green river" or from the form a'kir, of the tupi word ker, "to sleep, to rest"; but it is almost certain to be a deformation of Aquiri, the spelling which explorers of the region utilized to express Umákürü, or Uakiry, a term from the Ipurinã dialect. There is also a hypothesis that Acquiri derives from Yasi'ri, or Ysi'ri, meaning "flowing or swift water".

On the voyage which he made on the Purus River in 1878, the colonizer, João Gabriel de Carvalho Melo, wrote from there to the merchant, Viscount of Santo Elias (from Pará), asking him for goods to be sent to the "mouth of the Aquiri River". Since in Belém the proprietor of the commercial establishment and the employees were not able to understand João Gabriel's handwriting, or because he had hastily written Acri or Aqri, instead of Aquiri, the goods and the invoice arrived to the colonizer as having been sent to the Acre River.

Acre possesses some nicknames: the End of Brazil, The Rubber Tree State, the Latex State and the Western End.

The native inhabitants of Acre are called acrianos, in the singular acriano. Until the entry in force of the Orthographic Agreement of 1990, the correct spelling was acreano in the singular and in the plural acreanos. In 2009, with the new orthographic agreement, the change generated controversy between the Academy of Letters of Acre (Academia Acreana de Letras) and the Brazilian Academy of Letters (Academia Brasileira de Letras), alleging that the change would mean the denial of the state's historical and cultural roots, changing the last letter of the toponym from "E" to "I".