Place names considered unusual

Unusual place names are names for cities, towns, and other regions which are considered non-ordinary in some manner. This can include place names which are also offensive words, inadvertently humorous or highly charged words,[2] as well as place names of unorthodox spelling and pronunciation, including especially short or long names.

Hell, Norway
Fucking, Austria. The village changed its name on 1st January 2021 to "Fugging"[1]

Unusually descriptive place names
Westward Ho!, Devon, England, is the only settlement in the British Isles to have an exclamation mark in its name.

Inaccessible Island, a remotely located extinct volcanic island in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean, is so named for the difficulty in landing on the island and penetrating its interior because of the rough terrain.[3][4][5]

Death Valley, California, one of the hottest locations on Earth, got its English name after 13 pioneers died trying to cross the harsh desert valley during the California Gold Rush of 1849.[6] The highest recorded land temperature in the United States, 134 °F (56.7 °C), was recorded inside Death Valley at Furnace Creek, California, in 1913.[7]

Gardendale, Alabama, was originally named "Jugtown" for the jug and churn factory around which the town originally grew. Hettie Thomason Cargo, a local school teacher, proposed the name change in 1906 after being embarrassed to admit she was from "Jugtown" at a regional teachers' meeting. The town voted to rename itself Gardendale.[8]

Quibbletown, New Jersey, also known as New Market, is an unincorporated settlement within the township of Piscataway. The name of the settlement originated with a dispute as to whether the Sabbath was on Saturday or Sunday.[9]

Rough and Ready, California, is on the National List of Historic Places. It gets its name from the founder of the town, A. A. Townsend, who served under General Zachary Taylor in the Blackhawk War. Taylor was nicknamed "Rough and Ready" and was later elected president of the United States. Other places which include "and" in the name include Cut and Shoot, Texas and Eggs and Bacon Bay.

Roanoke, Virginia, was first established as the town of Big Lick in 1852 and was named for a large outcropping of salt that drew wildlife to the site near the Roanoke River. (The deer used to lick up the salt, hence the name Big Lick.)

Corn Exchange, Lesotho, is a town in Lesotho named after a corn exchange.

In 1969, the city of Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee, was formed from the separate communities of Soddy and Daisy, as well as nearby developed areas along U.S. Highway 27.

Place names that are homonyms for other words in the same language

Bland Shire, New South Wales, Australia, named for founder William Bland.[10][11]

Boring, Oregon, is named after William H. Boring, who settled in the area in the 1870s.[12] The town name is a homonym for the word boring, and the town often makes puns based on its name. Boring's town motto is "The most exciting place to live" and it has taken on the similarly named Dull, Scotland, as its sister city.[13][14][15] Boring, Maryland, was named in 1905 for its first postmaster, David Boring.[16]

The town of Montcuq, in France, has its name pronounced [mɔ̃kyk] or [mɔ̃ky], which closely resembles "my ass" in French, and for that reason was the subject of a famous humorous sketch on French television in 1976.[17]

Orange, New South Wales, Australia, founded in 1880, is a sister city to its homonym Orange, California, itself in the County of Orange. Orange, California, in turn, is also a sister city with Orange in Vaucluse, France. Franklin County, Massachusetts, includes a town called Orange. There exists another city called Orange in New Jersey, as well as a West Orange, a South Orange, and an East Orange; they are collectively known as The Oranges. Other towns named Orange exist in Connecticut, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia.

The county of Essex in southeastern England is home to the village of Ugley, and in the county of Hertfordshire, the hamlet of Nasty, which are only a few miles apart.

Arab, Alabama, was originally known as Thompson's Village; its current name is an unintentional misspelling by the U.S. Postal Service in 1882 of the city's intended name, taken from Arad Thompson, the son of the town founder, who had applied for a post office that year.

Profanity, humorous, and highly charged words
In 2019, American comedian Jimmy Kimmel launched a satirical candidacy for Mayor of Dildo, Newfoundland, Canada.[18]

A number of settlements have names that are offensive or humorous in other languages, such as Rottenegg or Fucking in Austria.[2] Although as a place name Fucking is benign in German, in English the word is usually vulgar. Similarly, when they hear of the French town of Condom, English speakers will likely associate it with condoms, a form of barrier contraception.[2][19] Hell, Norway, comes from the old Norse word hellir, which means "overhang" or "cliff cave". In modern Norwegian the word helvete means "hell", while the Norwegian word hell can mean "luck". One can also cite the mountain named Wank in Bavaria, Germany, which in German derives from Middle High German wanken, which means "to stagger". A street in Gosford was named 'Curly Dick Road' after the road's founder. In Leslie County, Kentucky, is a place named "Hell-for-Certain", and in Perry County, Ky., is a place named "Happy", and another place named "Dwarf".

Conversely, a number of place names can be considered humorous or offensive by their inhabitants, such as the Italian town of Bastardo ("Bastard") and Troia ("Slut", literally the female of the pig; the same name is used in Italian for the ancient city of Troy), or the German towns Affendorf ("Monkey Village"), Faulebutter ("Rancid Butter"), Fickmühlen ("Fuck Mills"), Himmelreich ("Kingdom of Heaven"), which appropriately lies at the edge of the Höllental ("Hell's Valley"), Katzenhirn ("Cat Brain", nearest to Mindelheim), Lederhose (Lederhosen, leather trousers), Neger ("Negro"), Plöd (blöd means "stupid", renamed in 2009), Regenmantel ("Raincoat"), and Warzen ("Warts").[20] The Austrian municipality Unterstinkenbrunn and the cadastral community Oberstinkenbrunn ("Lower Stinking Well" and "Upper Stinking Well" respectively) can also be considered offensive by residents. In Czechia, there are villages called Šukačka ("Fucking") and Onen Svět ("The Other World"), which are located 2 kilometres from each other.[21]

The US has the unincorporated community of Hell, Michigan, the unincorporated city of Intercourse, Pennsylvania, the historic community of Penile, Louisville in Kentucky, the county of Glasscock in Texas, Cumming, Georgia, and Pee Pee Township in Ohio. Dildo is a town in Newfoundland, Canada, and off the coast there is a Dildo Island. In the United Kingdom, there are towns called Cockermouth, Penistone, Wetwang, and Pett Bottom, the last of which is located 5 miles (8 km) south of Canterbury, Kent. According to the novels of Ian Fleming, James Bond lived there with his aunt after his parents died.

Other areas sometimes considered humorous are Butts County, Georgia, and Middelfart, Denmark. In Croatia, there are places such as "Babina Guzica" (Grandmother's Ass), "Špičkovina", and "Gnojnice". There are surprisingly many places called Salsipuedes ("get out if you can") in several Spanish-speaking countries (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay) and two regional areas in California based upon Mexican land grants (Rancho Cañada de Salsipuedes and Rancho Salsipuedes). Similarly, the Taklamakan Desert is said locally to mean "Place of No Return", more commonly interpreted as "once you get in, you'll never get out". There is also a town in Chile named Peor es Nada ("better than nothing", or, more literally, "worse is nothing"). Kisumu, a city in Kenya, shares a pronunciation with a well-known Arabic insult (كس امه).

Bell End, Worcestershire, is approximately 3 kilometres south-east of Hagley on the A491, north of Bromsgrove and close to Kidderminster, Stourbridge, and Halesowen. It lies in the local government district of Bromsgrove.

Some place names are deemed to be offensive or unacceptable, often through historic semantic changes in what is tolerated.[22][23][24]

An example of this would be the once common English street name Gropecunt Lane, whose etymology is a historical use of the street by prostitutes to ply their trade. During the Middle Ages the word cunt may often have been considered merely vulgar, having been in common use in its anatomical sense since at least the 13th century. Its steady disappearance from the English vernacular may have been the result of a gradual cleaning-up of the name; Gropecunt Lane in 13th-century Wells became Grope Lane, and then in the 19th century, Grove Lane.[25] In the city of York, Grapcunt Lane (grāp being the Old English word for "grope"[26]) was renamed Grope Lane and is now called Grape Lane.[27]

A similar case was in the town of Sasmuan, Pampanga, in the Philippines, formerly known as "Sexmoan" based on attempts by Spanish friars to transcribe Sasmuan; it was unanimously changed into Sasmuan in 1991 because of negative sexual connotations associated with the place name.[28][29]

Swastika, Ontario

In Canada, the town of Swastika, Ontario, founded in 1908, adopted its name about a dozen years before the Nazi Party adopted the swastika as a symbol.

In Gombe, Nigeria, there is a town called "Porno", a term also used as a diminutive for pornography in most occidental languages. In Hungary, a village next to the Austrian border is called Pornóapáti ("Porn Abbey").

In Spain, a municipality was named Castrillo Matajudíos ("Jew-killer Camp") from 1627 to 2015. Matamoros (Moor killer), however, remains a common place name, surname, and even the name of several businesses in Spanish-speaking countries.

In Hong Kong, many place names contain reference to feces and urine (屎 and 尿 in Chinese, transcribed to Shi and Niu respectively). Some of those settled places have got the name changed to avoid the offensiveness, for example, Ma Liu Shui and Kau Shi Wai, although in the former case the word Niu is just a homonym of another character 嫽 (Liu, literally meaning playing).

A number of place names in the United States and Canada historically used the word "nigger", a derogatory term for black people. Over the course of the 20th century, many of these place names were changed because of the racist connotations of the word. One example is Dead Nigger Creek in Texas (named to commemorate the Buffalo Soldier tragedy of 1877) which was changed to Dead Negro Draw.[30] Another is Niggerhead Mountain near Malibu, California, which was changed to Negrohead Mountain in the 1960s and finally to Ballard Mountain in 2010 for an early African American settler.[31] In Canada, Quebec decided in 2015 to rename 11 places within the province that contained the word "nigger" or the French equivalent, nègre.[32] In 2016 New Zealand renamed three locations which were found to be offensive, Niggerhead, Nigger Hill, and Nigger Stream.[33]

Likewise there is pressure to remove the word "squaw" from place names, a traditional term for a Native American woman now considered derogatory. In 2003, Squaw Peak in Phoenix, Arizona, was renamed to Piestewa Peak, after Specialist Lori Ann Piestewa, killed in action during Operation Iraqi Freedom.[34]

Lexically unusual place names

There are ten current or former towns in Norway, five towns in Sweden, and one town in Denmark, whose place name consists of the single letter Å. There are dozens of other one- or two-letter place names in countries around the world.

The longest single-word place name in the world is Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu, a hill in New Zealand.

Other name changes

Sometimes settlement names are changed as a publicity stunt or to promote tourism.

Kindai University in Osaka, Japan, changed its English-language name from Kinki University (pronounced kinky) in 2014, which, in the English language, has a provocative meaning. The Japanese-language name of the university (近畿大学 (Kinki daigaku)) was left unchanged. The change was globally reported, though since its founding in 1949, the original name was not a problem within Japan. However, with the dramatic globalization of Japanese universities in recent decades, including the presence of hundreds of foreign students, staff, faculty, and visiting scholars on campus, the leadership of the university made the change in 2016, after deciding to do so in 2014.[35]

Waters, Arkansas, changed its name to Pine Ridge, Arkansas, after it became known that the fictional town Pine Ridge in the radio sitcom Lum and Abner was based on Waters. Now a sparsely populated and no longer incorporated community, Pine Ridge is home to a Lum and Abner museum.[36]

Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, changed its name from Hot Springs in 1950, after the host of the radio program Truth or Consequences promised free publicity to any town willing to change its name to that of the show.[37] Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, changed its name from Mauch Chunk in honor of the famous athlete when his widow agreed to allow his remains to be buried there.

In 1999, the town of Halfway, Oregon, changed its name to Half.com for one year after the e-commerce start-up of the same name offered 20 computers, as well as $110,000 for the school, and other financial subsidies.[38]

Saint Augusta, Minnesota, was for a short time named Ventura after the then-governor Jesse Ventura (whose ring name was in turn named after the city of Ventura, California) to draw attention in avoiding annexation by the nearby city of Saint Cloud.[39] The name was reverted to the original name after the crisis passed.

In the late 1990s, the town of Granville, North Dakota, agreed to change its name temporarily to McGillicuddy City as part of a promotion for Dr. McGillicuddy's schnapps.[40]

In March 2010, Topeka, Kansas, temporarily changed its name to Google, after the technology company, in an attempt to secure the installation of Google Fiber in the city.

Unorthodox spelling or pronunciation
The railway station sign in the village of Llanfairpwllgwyngyll­gogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, Wales, gives an approximation of the correct pronunciation for English speakers
Webster, Massachusetts firefighter's patch with the longest version of "Webster Lake's" name on its circumference

Unorthodox spelling or pronunciation, particularly short or long names, and names derived from unusual sources are often seen as unusual, especially by people outside the culture which named them. The Welsh village Llanfairpwllgwyngyll­gogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch changed its name in the 1860s from the shorter Llanfairpwllgwyngyll to increase its publicity. At 58 letters, it has the longest place name in the UK.[41] The body of fresh water in Webster, Massachusetts, that has historically (since at least 1921) borne the apparently Native American 45-letter/fourteen-syllable name Lake Chargoggagoggmanch­auggagoggchaubunagungamaugg is usually shortened, for instance on road maps, to using only the final six syllables from its "long form"; as Lake Chaubunagungamaug, or even more simply to "Webster Lake".

Conversely, there are several settlements whose name consists of only one letter. A number of Norwegian towns are named Å. The name often comes from the Old Norse word Ár, meaning small river. Examples include: Å, Åfjord; Å, Meldal; Å, Lavangen; and Å, Tranøy[42] (also compare rivers named Aa). A village in northern France has been called Y since the 13th century. The Netherlands has IJ (Amsterdam), formerly spelled Y. The Dutch digraph IJ, although typed using two characters, is sometimes considered a ligature, or even a single letter in itself.

There are a number of place names that seem unusual to English speakers because they do not conform to standard English orthography rules. Examples include the Welsh towns of Ysbyty Ystwyth and Bwlchgwyn which appear to English speakers to contain no vowel characters, although y and w represent vowel sounds in Welsh.[43] Aioi, Japan; Eiao, Marquesas Islands; Aiea, Hawaii;[note 1] Oia, Greece; Oia, Spain; Aia and Ea, Spanish Basque Country; and Ii, Finland, on the other hand, contain only vowels and no consonants.[44] Kyyy, Russia, contains a triple y; triples of any letter in English are considered rare.

Unusual names may also be created as a result of error by the naming authority. An example is Rednaxela Terrace in Hong Kong, which is believed to be the name Alexander but erroneously written right-to-left (the normal practice for writing Chinese in the past), and the name has stayed and even transcribed back to Chinese phonetically.

Road sign theft
Main article: Street sign theft
Large stone road sign, installed to deter theft, in Shitterton, Dorset, England.

As a result of increased notoriety, road signs are commonly stolen in Fucking, Austria, as souvenirs[45] – the only crime which has been reported in the village.[46] It cost some 300 euros to replace each stolen sign, and the costs were reflected in the taxes that local residents pay.[47] In 2004, owing mainly to the stolen signs, a vote was held on changing the village's name, but the residents voted against doing so.[48] Tarsdorf municipality's mayor Siegfried Höppl stated that it was decided to keep the name as it had existed for 800 years,[48] and further stated that "everyone here knows what it means in English, but for us Fucking is Fucking – and it's going to stay Fucking."[49] In November 2020, the council of Tarsdorf voted to have the village's name officially changed to Fugging (pronounced the same as Fucking in the dialect spoken in the region), effective 1 January 2021.[50][51][52]

In 2010, the inhabitants of Shitterton, Dorset, purchased a 1.5-ton block of Purbeck stone to place at the entrance to Shitterton, carved with the hamlet's name to prevent theft.[53] A truck and crane were hired by volunteers to put the stone in place at a total cost of £680.[53][54]

See also

Notes
  1. Aiea has an initial glottal stop in Hawaiian, which was dropped in English orthography.

References
  1. Austrian village of 'Fucking' decides to change its name
  2. Pike, Steven (2012). Destination Marketing. Routledge. p. 230. ISBN 978-1-136-00265-6.
  3. "History of Inaccessible Island, South Atlantic Ocean". Archived from the original on 29 June 2012. Retrieved 24 July 2014.
  4. "Inaccessible Island". Tristandc.com. Retrieved 6 August 2013.
  5. Édouard Ducéré, Histoire maritime de Bayonne: Les corsaires sous la̓ncien régime (Bayonne, 1895:307-24) reproduces the sieur d'Etcheverry's manuscript narrative of his voyage to Moluccas in 1770 in the Etoile du Matin and mentions a second voyage in 1772.
  6. Lingenfelter, Richard E.; Dwyer, Richard A. (1988). Death Valley Lore, Classic Tales of Fantasy, Adventure and Mystery. Reno: University of Nevada Press. ISBN 0-87417-136-9.
  7. "World Meteorological Organization World Weather / Climate Extremes Archive". Archived from the original on 4 January 2013. Retrieved 10 January 2013.
  8. "Gardendale History". City of Gardendale, AL. Retrieved 1 September 2018.
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  10. "Bland, Dull and Boring: Three towns team up to excite tourists". MSN. Archived from the original on 16 November 2013. Retrieved 9 August 2014.
  11. Baskas, Harriet (25 April 2014). "Dull, Boring and Bland Team Up to Lure Tourists". NBC News. Retrieved 9 August 2014.
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  13. Gambino, Lauren. "Dull and Boring? Sounds exciting". KVAL. Archived from the original on 22 October 2013. Retrieved 22 February 2013.
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  17. "Video unavailable". Institut national de l'audiovisuel. Retrieved 1 June 2020 – via YouTube.
  18. McCabe, Meghan (13 August 2019). "Jimmy Kimmel's sidekick Guillermo Rodriguez does Dildo – reluctantly". CBC.ca. Retrieved 1 June 2020.
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  20. "Schluss mit Plöd! – Wie ein lustiger Ortsname zur Last wird". TZ (in German). Munich. 14 November 2008.
  21. https://mapy.cz/zakladni?x=13.2684957&y=49.2273396&z=15&l=0
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  29. Jennings, Ken (2012). Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks. Scribner. ISBN 978-1439167182.
  30. "Dead Negro Draw". The Handbook of Texas. Texas State Historical Association. Retrieved 5 October 2014.
  31. Cholly. "From Niggerhead to Negrohead to Ballard, a Mountain Finally Gets A Decent Name". AfricanAmerica.org. Retrieved 1 June 2020.
  32. "No more place names that contain the N-word allowed, Quebec commission rules". CBC News. Retrieved 13 February 2018.
  33. "New Zealand drops racially offensive place names". The Telegraph. Retrieved 7 June 2017.
  34. Fischer, Howard (17 April 2003). "Board renames Squaw Peak after Piestewa". Arizona Daily Sun. Retrieved 12 July 2016.
  35. McCurry, Justin (21 May 2014). "Japan's Kinki University changes its name due to awkward English meaning". The Guardian. Retrieved 1 June 2020.
  36. "NRHP nomination for Huddlestone Store and McKinzie Store" (PDF). Arkansas Preservation. Retrieved 12 October 2015.
  37. Carpenter, Cindy; Fletcher, Sherry (2010). Truth Or Consequences. South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing. p. 7. ISBN 978-0738579177.
  38. "What Ever Happened to Half.com, Oregon?", Design Observer Observery, The Design Observer Group, archived from the original on 21 January 2013, retrieved 30 December 2011
  39. Helms, Marisa (24 January 2000). "The City of Ventura". Minnesota Public Radio. Retrieved 1 June 2020.
  40. "N.D. town changing its name for shot at Schnapps money". Lawrence Journal-World. 13 February 1998. Retrieved 1 June 2020 – via Google News Archive.
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  42. Rygh, Oluf (1901). Norske gaardnavne: Søndre Trondhjems amt (in Norwegian) (14 ed.). Kristiania, Norge: W. C. Fabritius & sønners bogtrikkeri. p. 23.
  43. Rowland, Paul (1 November 2013). "14 Welsh Place Names With No (English) Vowels". Wales Online.
  44. Eckler, Albert Ross (1969). "Word Ways". The Journal of Recreational Linguistics. Word Ways. 7–8: 146.
  45. "Urban Legends Reference Pages: Welcome to Austria". Snopes.com. Retrieved 26 March 2013.
  46. Harnden, Toby (28 August 2005). "No, there are no F***ing postcards". The Daily Telegraph. London. Retrieved 7 November 2009.
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  48. "Brits steal carloads of F**king Austrian roadsigns", The Register, 15 August 2005.
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  50. Dallison, Paul (26 November 2020). "Austrian village of Fucking to be renamed Fugging". Politico Europe. Retrieved 27 November 2020.
  51. "Fugging Hell: Tired Of Mockery, Austrian Village Changes Name". Barron's. Agence France-Presse. 26 November 2020. Retrieved 29 November 2020.
  52. "Kundmachung Gemeinderatssitzung" (in German).
  53. "Sign Of The Times: Shitterton Hits Back". Sky News. 23 July 2010. Retrieved 5 January 2013.
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