 "Maroon", which can have a more general sense of being abandoned without resources, entered English around the 1590s, from the French adjective "marron", meaning 'feral' or 'fugitive'.The American Spanish word "cimarrón" is often given as the source of the English word "maroon", used to describe the runaway slave communities in Florida, in the Great Dismal Swamp on the border of Virginia and North Carolina, on colonial islands of the Caribbean, and in other parts of the New World.Lyle Campbell says the Spanish word "cimarrón" means 'wild, unruly' or 'runaway slave'.