28 April 2021
The origins of toponyms, or place names, are a tricky category to research. All too often, the origins are obscured or mixed up with local folklore and unverified facts. Some are easy—any North American toponym that beings with New usually has an obvious proximate origin, although the European toponym it’s based on may have an uncertain origin. For instance, we know that New Jersey is named after the Channel Island, but we only have a reasonable guess as to where the Channel Island gets its name—we’re pretty sure it’s from an Old Norse personal name, Geirr’s ey (Geirr’s Island), but we don’t know that for certain. Other names, especially those of Native American origin, are often highly questionable. European mangling of the indigenous names often renders the origin unrecognizable, and when we can identify the language and word it comes from, often the literal meaning of that indigenous word is uncertain because knowledge of that language has atrophied as a result of there being too few speakers left.
To properly research any one toponym often requires intensive archival research in state, provincial, and local historical archives and expertise in a Native American language. Because I don’t have the resources to invest weeks of work on a single place name, much less expertise in dozens of Native American languages, on this site I generally rely on published toponymic dictionaries. While the ones I use are well researched, the editors of these dictionaries have the same resource constraints that I do. And, because the nature of dictionaries is that the entries need to be brief, often warnings about the tentative nature of the findings are stripped out. This is a problem with secondary sources in general, not just toponyms; as information is repeated and cited, caveats and hedges fall away and what was originally speculation or weakly supported becomes framed as iron-clad fact.
In short, take any origins of place names with grain of salt unless they are accompanied with a chain of citations to supporting evidence.
