Place Names With Surprising Origins

Place Names With Surprising Origins: Toponymy, the study of place names, shows that many famous names began as misunderstandings, marketing stunts, jokes or words from languages that have otherwise vanished, preserving lost history in everyday maps.

Canada: The country's name likely comes from the Iroquoian word kanata, meaning village, which explorer Jacques Cartier took to be the name of the whole region.

Yucatán: A popular story says the name means I don't understand you in Maya, a reply to confused Spaniards, though linguists consider this a myth.

Nome: Local legend says a British mapmaker wrote ? Name next to an unnamed cape in Alaska, and a copyist misread it as Nome.

Greenland: According to the Icelandic sagas, Erik the Red picked this flattering name for a mostly icy island because he thought it would lure settlers.

Spain: One theory says the Roman name Hispania traces to a Phoenician phrase meaning land of hyraxes, because the sailors mistook the local rabbits for animals from home.

Brazil: The country is named after brazilwood, a tree prized for its red dye, from a Portuguese word related to brasa, meaning glowing ember.

Argentina: Its name comes from the Latin for silver, inspired by explorers' hopes of riches along the Río de la Plata, even though the region had little silver.

Chicago: The city's name comes from a Miami-Illinois word for a wild onion or leek that grew along the river, so it is roughly named after a stinky plant.

Pennsylvania: William Penn wanted to call his colony Sylvania, but King Charles II added Penn to honor Penn's father, which left the modest Quaker embarrassed.

Venezuela: Its name means little Venice, given by explorers who saw Indigenous houses built on stilts over the waters of Lake Maracaibo.

Nigeria: The name was coined in 1897 by journalist Flora Shaw, who later married colonial administrator Frederick Lugard, in a newspaper article about the Niger River region.

Singapore: Its name means lion city, from a legend about a prince who saw a lion there, though lions never lived on the island and he probably saw a tiger.

Hong Kong: The name means fragrant harbor, likely a nod to the incense wood trade that once passed through the area.

Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg: The famous translation of this Massachusetts lake's name, you fish on your side, I fish on my side, was invented as a joke by a newspaper editor in the 1920s.

Truth or Consequences: The New Mexico town of Hot Springs renamed itself in 1950 after a popular radio quiz show, as part of a publicity contest.

Boring: This Oregon town is named after early settler William Harrison Boring, and it has embraced the joke by pairing with Dull in Scotland.

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch: This Welsh village's 58 letter name was stretched in the 1860s as a publicity stunt to attract tourists and train passengers.

Idaho: Promoters claimed it meant gem of the mountains in a Native language, but the word was likely invented by lobbyist George M. Willing.

Mount Everest: Surveyor George Everest objected to having the peak named after him, and he actually pronounced his name Eve rest.

Martin Waldseemüller: The German mapmaker put the name America on his 1507 world map to honor Amerigo Vespucci, and the label stuck even after he dropped it from later maps.

Portland: The Oregon city's name was decided by a coin toss in 1845 between two founders from Maine and Massachusetts, and it nearly became Boston.

Wales: The English name comes from an old Germanic word for foreigners, meaning the Anglo-Saxons labeled the native Britons outsiders in their own land.

Gibraltar: The name comes from the Arabic Jabal Tariq, the mountain of Tariq, after the commander Tariq ibn Ziyad who landed there in 711.

Pacific Ocean: Ferdinand Magellan called it the peaceful sea after a calm crossing in 1520, even though it produces some of the most powerful storms on the planet.