Good morning, fellow travelers. The other day I sent out a list of the most difficult city names to pronounce, across the U.S. I was still fiddling around with that Mental Floss article when I saw the map at the bottom of this article. It is an etymological map of the states and their capitals. We’ve covered things like this before, but I love etymologies and love this map because it’s all there for us to see, but it’s brief. (I’ve been taking a LinkedIn® course about infographics and our visual vs. text understanding and memories.)
If you want to read the entire article, it is here in Mental Floss. For the short version, here is their introduction, and then a link to the map. Enjoy!
The multicultural history of the United States is evident from maps of the country. French, English, Spanish, Hawaiian, and Algonquian are just a handful of the languages you would need to speak to understand the literal meanings of every American place name. Fortunately, you don’t need to be a polyglot to read a U.S. map like a book; just take a take a look at the graphic below for the English translations of capital city and state names.
To put together this etymological map of America, Wordtips pulled from multiple resources, including the American Library Association, the Online Etymology Dictionary, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The website used a minimum of two sources to determine each etymology in the report.
Kara Church | Technical Editor, Advisory
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