What’s in a Place Name?

There’s nothing like a long road trip or even a little time with a detailed map — paper or virtual — to give you a new appreciation of the weird things people get up to. In this case, the thing is place names. These aren’t all from the route-of-flight between Ottawa and Phoenix, but that’s how I recently got thinking about the multiplicity of place names. Your results may vary.

It’s kinda like collecting license-plate sightings: Once you start, it’s hard to stop. And considering that we likely began with place names no more complicated than Here, Over There, and Waaay Over There, it’s amazing what we’ve generated.

There are the names using famous place names that everyone knows are from somewhere else (but which, of course, leave us wondering how the namesakes got going):

• Bat Cave, NC
• Bolivia, NC
• Carthage, NC
• London, ON (also France, Serbia, 10 American States, Kiribati, and an asteroid)
• Mexico, NY (also IN, ME, MO, and PA)
• Newfoundland, NC
• Paris, AR (also IA, ID, IL, IN, KY, and ME)

There are the ones that seem to invoke names from elsewhere, but cutely or coyly:

• Eutaw, TX
• Nuangola, PA

There are the ones recycling less-than-famous names from elsewhere, sometimes to greater glory and sometimes not:

• Calgary, AB (from a hamlet in Scotland)
• Morningside, AB (from another small town in Scotland)

There are all the News, in English and French and Latin and other languages, too, I’m sure, which just pushes the name-categorization task back (up?) one level:

• New Brunswick/Nouveau-Brunswick
• New Edinburgh (formerly a village in ON and now a mere neighbourhood in Ottawa)
• New York, NY
• New Zealand
• Nova Scotia

There are the ones that anglicize an indigenous word/phrase:

• Michigan, from mishigami (Ottawan for “large water/lake”)
• Niagara Falls, ON & NY, maybe from onguiaahra (Iroquoian for “the strait” [maybe])
• North and South Dakota, from dakhota (Sioux for “friend” or “ally”)
• Saskatchewan, from kisiskatchewanisipi (Cree for “flowing river”)
• Saskatoon, SK, from either misaskwatominiskahk (Cree for “at the place of many saskatoon berries”) or  sask-kwa-tan (Cree for “the place where willows are cut”)

There are the ones that evoke royalty, sometimes in English, sometimes not, and sometimes eliding “so-and-so’s town” and the like into something a little easier to say:

• Kingston, ON (which likely started somewhere as King’s Town but is now used in this tidy form in 80+ places worldwide)
• Montréal, QC (which started as Mont Réal, or Royal Mountain)
• Prince Edward Island
• Regina, SK
• Victoria Falls, Zambia

There are the ones named after a famous and/or local person, using first or last name:

• Gibson, PA (also TN and NC, which has a Gibson and Gibsonville more or less side-by-each – no chance of confusion there)
• Scranton, PA
• Sheldon, NY
• Vancouver, BC (also WA)
• Washington (too many to enumerate)

There are hundreds (thousands? kazillions?) with religious connotations:

• Saint Lawrence River, Canada and USA
• San Francisco, CA
• Santo Domingo, DR

There are the ones that describe or at least allude to some local geographic feature:

• Camel Back Mountain, AZ
• Great Barrier Reef, Australia
• Rio Grande, TX
• Watertown, NY (and in nine other American States; Waterton, AB is named after a naturalist and who knows how he got his name?)

There are the ones that combine a local geographic feature with a famous/local person’s name:

• Chagrin Falls, OH
• Hudson River, NY
• Stevens Creek, ON

There’s the one that looks like it might be describing a local geographic feature but is really an anglicized version of a recycled name:

• Cape Horn, Chile (named for the Dutch city of Hoorn, whose etymology is uncertain, although either royalty or alcohol may have been involved)

There are the ones that were the forte but hardly the exclusive domain of Lewis and Clarke, giving us names that describe how the namers felt about the geographical feature:

• Bonavista, NL (and numerous elsewhere, also Buena Vista)
• Cape Desolation, Greenland
• Cape Disappointment, WA
• Cape Fear, NC
• Dismal Nitch, WA

There are the ones that memorialize memorable events:

• Dead Horse Creek, AZ (also MB and WA on this continent, and it’s hard to believe Australia doesn’t have such a place)
• Waterloo, ON (from some minor battle in Belgium apparently; also NS and NB in Canada; and there are Waterloos in England, Hong Kong (huh?), New Zealand, Sierra Leone, Suriname,  24 American States [including three in Indiana which may have seemed like a good idea at the time], and Antarctica, if we give King George Island its Russian name, Vaterloo)

There are the ones named after trees and other growing stuff:

• Alamo, TX (apparently a type of poplar)
• Almond, NC (which State really got into this category with Ash, Balsam, Gumtree, Magnolia, Maple, Mulberry, and Walnut – at least)
• Chichicastenango, Guatemala (from Tzitzicaztenanco, a Nahuatl word meaning City of Nettles, so this city finds a home in three categories at least given that its full name is Santo Tomás Chichicastenango)
• Myrtle Beach, SC

There’s really no end to it. There are:

• Ones that seem rude (Lugoff and Effingham, SC; Grabtown, NC)
• Ones that might be describing the local character (Concord, Hasty, Love Valley, and Mocksville, NC) or prescribing behaviour (Fair Play, SC; Trust, NC) or identifying dominant occupations (Barber, Ranger, and Spies, NC)
• Ones that seem like an orphaned half of a one-time duo (Dames Ferry, GA)
• Ones that clearly bear a little more exploration (Birdtown, PA)

And then (not “finally” in any sense except the final list in this post) there are the true gems, the little puzzles that defy immediate categorization:

• Chunky, MS
• Dildo, NL
• Dortches, NC
• Phinizy, GA
• Throop, NY
• Shickshinny, PA
• Snitz Creek, PA

Could I find out more about these outliers? Almost for sure. But here I rest, happy to leave some mysteries to enjoy.