Where Your County Got its Name

Canadian County in Oklahoma is around 1,000 miles from Canada. This is because the name of the county doesn't derive from the US's northern neighbor but comes from the Canadian River (which apparently gets its name from some Canadians who were once spotted camping on its banks).

I discovered the etymology of Canadian County thanks to Lia Prins' interactive map of US country names. Lia's map explains the origin of every single county name in the United States. For example did you know that Deaf Smith County in Texas is named for Erastus "Deaf" Smith, a hero of the Texas Revolution? Or that Carbon County in Wyoming gets its name from the large anthracite coal deposits which have been found there. 

The interactive map in How Do Place Names Differ Across America? colors US counties based on what they are named for. The five categories used are: People, Nature, Place, Thing and Unknown. The map also includes the option to color each county by the language of its name (Non-Indigenous or Indigenous). If you hover over a county on the map you can discover the actual origin of its place-name.

As you can see from the screenshot above the map is dominated by yellow counties. These are counties which are named for people - mostly men (1.1% of US counties are named for women).  How Do Place Names Differ Across America? also includes a small multiple map visualization which shows the distribution of county names by some other categories.

 

These small maps show the discrepancy between the number of counties named for men and the number named after women. The Place outside America map shows that those counties named for foreign parts are mainly concentrated in the north-east. Presumably these were among some of the first places to be settled by Europeans in the United States. 

the foundation of the 225 largest US cities by date (1600-1979)

If you are interested in the etymology of city names in the United States then you might like my own Town Names map. Town Names explains the origins of the 225 most populated towns and cities in the USA. 

If you mouse-over a town or city name on the Town Names map you can learn how the town originally got its name. The map also reveals the year when each of the cities was founded. You can use the year buttons (running down the left-hand side of the map) to filter the towns and cities shown on the map by year of foundation.