Place Names in the U.S.A‪.‬

Only two decades after Christopher Columbus, Juan Ponce de León sailed from Puerto Rico to the northwest and reached what is now the southeastern part of the continental United States. On 2 April 1513, he gave this nation the first name that should survive unchanged for at least another five hundred years. It was a week after the Easter of Flowers, and since Ponce de León imagined the land to be flowering and prosperous, he called it Terra Florida – the “flowering land.”

This incident not only marks the beginning of recorded name-giving in the United States but is also the first example for one of the most pervasive non-English influences, namely Spanish. These place names now number over 2,000, stretching across the “Sunbelt” from coast to coast.

English explorers, notably Sir Walter Raleigh, came some seventy years later and landed further to the north. They adopted Amerindian nomenclature, and so did many settlers who followed in their footsteps, although pronunciation was changed to suit the English tongue. On occasion, folk-etymology gave an Indian name a completely new meaning: Moskitu-auke, for instance, meaning “grass-land,” was changed to Mosquito Hawk, another word for “dragonfly.”