What's In A Name

The fun and meaning of place-names

One of the strangest tasks I’ve had in my planning career was to name a series of streets, parks, and neighborhoods in a masterplanned development on a barren coastal patch of Saudi Arabia. My first thought was to look into the region’s history, the geographic features of the site, and the proposed character of the masterplan for inspiration. I thought about species of local birds, the sea turtles that migrated through the adjacent waters, and the direction of the sunrise and sunset over various parks and neighborhoods. When I had a strong list of potential names going — most of them nature-inspired— I started to have doubts. I’d planned to have my list translated by an Arabic-speaking designer on our team, but besides not understanding the nuances of the language I had assumed naming places after birds, fish, and sunrises was a convention in Arabic-speaking places. You might see Seagull Street on a sign in Cape Cod and think it was a perfectly logical thing to name a street, but would that translate?

I love place names, they are one of the most obvious and powerful ways in which a place is given meaning. In his lovely little book Names of New York the author Joshua Jelly-Schapiro puts it well:

“Names mark us. Totems of identity, systems of allusion, names can signal where we’re from, who our people are, who we attach ourselves to, and which Bible character or dead relative or living movie star our namers loved best.”

Cities, with their density of cultures, histories, and places in need of identity are particularly rich in names. As the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan says a city “can be seen as a construction of words as much as of stone.” A lot of the time these words are matter-of-fact. Names communicate information: location, ownership, or use. Poultry Street in London is where the poultry sellers worked, and Canal Street in New York used to have a canal. But even the most-matter-of-fact name can be subtly creative, choosing to foreground some features of a place over others. There was always something evocative about seeing Burnt Oak listed on the London Tube map, named after a long-gone tree that was struck by lightning there. Of all the things you could have said about the place that’s the one that ended up sticking. As Burnt Oak suggests a good name may also outlast its original inspiration becoming a signpost of history in a city that’s otherwise ever-changing.

The US, with its self-mythologizing, mashup of cultures, and waves of settlement and migration is a particularly eclectic mix of place names, some highly specific, others comically random. “Berg” is the German word for mountain or hill (as in iceberg), and over time because towns and castles were often built on hills it became a word that also stood for a settlement (as in Hamburg). At some point, Americans became obsessed with this suffix and created a spree of burgs from Gettysburg to Pittsburgh to Greenburgh. The two business partners who claimed the slice of land in Oregon where the Willamette and Columbia Rivers meet were from Boston and Portland Maine respectively. They flipped a coin to decide which one got to name their new settlement and the Mainer won, thus Portland Oregon was born (the name Portland replaced the much cooler colloquial name for the area “Stumptown” after all the tree stumps the timber industry had created). In New York, many of our names are Dutch approximations of Native American names (Manhattan). When the English replaced the Dutch as colonial administrators they brought their names with them (New York, most obviously) but also kept and twisted many of the Dutch words. Haarlem became Harlem, Bouwerie, the Dutch word for farm, became Bowery - these names couldn’t have been invented in any other place.

Some of the best names refer to the feeling or experience of a place. Hong Kong in Cantonese translates to “fragrant harbor,” apparently to mark the incense trading it was known for in medieval times. The Imperial compound in Beijing, Zǐjìnchéng, translates roughly to “Purple Forbidden City,” purple being associated with the North Star, the home in Heaven of the Emperor, and forbidden evoking its exclusivity and separation from terrestrial life. My favorite place name in New York is “Hell’s Kitchen,” a name with many proposed origins all of which stem from its historic filthiness and danger. Compared to something like Canal Street, these names are light on tangible information, but in their way, they still tell you everything you need to know.

Returning to my attempt at naming streets in Saudi Arabia, I ended up looking at— of all places—a British colonial survey of Palestine to grasp the basics, one of the earliest English language attempts to break Arabic place names into component parts. Like the European naming tradition, Arabic places are often named after geographic features, owners, or historic uses. But commonly they’re named after feelings and familial meanings.

Jeddah, the city nearby to our project in Saudi Arabia, can trace its etymology to the Arabic word for “Grandmother.” The city of Algirs is colloquially known as el-Bahdja which translates to “the joy.” Cairo means “the vanquisher.” Needless to say… Seagull Street didn’t feel exactly at home in this highly evocative naming culture. We lost the master-planning competition to plan this new town so there isn’t a collection of streets in Saudi Arabia named by yours truly… which is probably for the best. I was asked the next month to do a similar exercise for a residential development on the coast in Ireland, which exposed me to an entirely new place-naming culture. I ended up looking at Gaelic words for sealife, many of which have no direct English translation - including “aice” which most closely means a place in which lobsters are known to hide. Needless to say, the blood-sucking developer building these houses ended up going with a different name, much closer to Seagull Street — and that concluded my short career as the place-naming guy in the office.

Have you ever named a place? Officially, or maybe just among your friends. If so, let me know how you went about it.