What’s in a name? How we refer to U.S. cities, towns, states, bodies of water, mountains and other geographic features is key to their unique identities.
Some American place names, or toponyms, are rooted in the Indigenous languages of the people who lived on the land long before colonization. Others honor historical figures. And some refer to the physical characteristics of the locations or to well-known explorers and settlers.
“Place names always reflect the culture and the values and the priority of the people who have the power to make those place names stick,” says Ruth Mostern, professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh and an editor of Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers.
The issue of U.S. place names took center stage after President Donald Trump announced in January 2025 that Denali, the iconic Alaska peak, would revert to Mount McKinley and that the Gulf of Mexico would be renamed the Gulf of America.
Naming conflicts aren’t new. After the United States gained independence in 1776 and began expanding westward in the 1800s, naming inconsistencies increased. The U.S. Board on Geographic Names was formed in 1890 to address these conflicts, playing an important and sometimes contentious role.
Settlers Adopt, Change Indigenous Names
An aerial view of Detroit, Michigan. French explorers named Michigan, from the Algonquin word “Mishigamaw,” meaning “big lake” or “great water.”
Indigenous people named places based on their relationship with the land and how they lived in specific environments—the kind of hunting they did there or the types of resources they found. Other names came from ancestral stories. Wakonda, a small South Dakota town, has the name of a god or superior being for multiple Native American tribes.
Indigenous place names were passed down mainly through tradition. But European settlers who colonized America starting in the late 15th century recorded the names they gave to their claimed land on maps and in other documents, frequently erasing Indigenous place names from history.
Settlers sometimes adopted variations of Indigenous place names or words. French explorers named one territory “Michigan,” which comes from the Algonquin word “Mishigamaw,” meaning “big lake” or “great water.”
Colonists also named places after themselves, their home countries and the nobles funding expeditions. One legend says Ann Arbor got the first part of its name for the founders’ wives, both named Ann—a theory that has been challenged by some historians.
Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English colony was named after King James I. The English soon seized the territory called New Amsterdam from Dutch settlers and renamed it “New York” after the Duke of York.
“There’s a nationalistic tendency among naming, and a lot of times, it’s to create control and authority,” says Valerie Fridland, professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada at Reno.
Locations Named After Politicians, Events
Following the founding of the United States, places were increasingly named after national figures, most notably Washington, D.C., in 1791 after George Washington. There’s also Nebraska’s state capital of Lincoln, named in 1867 for the 16th U.S. president, Abraham Lincoln.
U.S. place names also mark events in locations. California’s “Death Valley” originated after a group searching for gold in 1849 got lost in a snowstorm. The Lost ‘49ers thought they would die but found their way out and one of them uttered “Goodbye, Death Valley.” The name stuck.
The Grand Canyon was called “Öngtupqa,” or “Salt Canyon,” by the Hopi people. Major John Wesley Powell explored it in 1869 and called it the “Grand Canyon” in a report. Topographers then recorded his name on a map.
As Americans mapped more places, spelling inconsistencies abounded. One example is the Bering Sea, which was listed in some maps and textbooks as the “Behring Sea” or “Behring’s Sea.” Pittsburgh was sometimes spelled without an h at the end.
Board Formed to Standardize Names
Government officials increasingly focused on U.S. place name standardization during the latter part of the 19th century. In 1890, President Benjamin Harrison signed an executive order establishing the United States Board on Geographic Names to resolve “all unsettled questions concerning geographic names.”
The board’s first bulletin had 226 decisions, including spelling clarification for the Bering Sea, the country of Chile (not “Chili”) and the Fiji Islands (not “Feejee”).
The board also declared the name Mount Rainier for the Pacific Northwest volcano, overruling the name for it from the Puyallup people, Mount Tacoma or “Tahoma.” It translates roughly to “the mother of waters” because the mountain is a vital water source. The Mount Rainier name dates to 1792, when British Navy Captain George Vancouver named the peak after his friend, Rear Admiral Peter Rainier.
The board’s duties continued evolving. But President Franklin D. Roosevelt abolished it in 1934 and transferred its duties to the Department of the Interior. Congress re-established the board in 1947 and broadened its responsibilities.
The board receives name proposals from various sources instead of coming up with the names, but eliminates offensive place names, including derogatory words in federal publications and maps in the 1960s and 1970s for Japanese and Black people.
In 2021, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the nation’s first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary, declared “squaw” a derogatory term and ordered names with the term eliminated from federal usage.
Naming Spats Frequently Emerge
The Sun (now The Baltimore Sun) in 1891 claimed board decisions included “evident departures from local usage” and that the government should record place names but not alter them. It listed Pittsburgh as an example. The “h” wasn’t added until 1911, after a years-long campaign by the city.
In 1924, Congress asked the board to change Mount Rainier’s name to Mount Tacoma, arguing Rainier sided with the British during the Revolutionary War and supported slavery. In the board’s rejection, Chairman C. Hart Merriam wrote: “Think of the chaos in geography, history and science that would result if new names were given to the world’s most prominent landmarks.”
When Hawaii gained statehood in 1959, the board deviated, in some cases, from the spelling used by native Hawaiian speakers. In the 1990s, the state’s naming board began reviewing over 10,000 Hawaiian place names for proper use of diacritical marks, at the request of the U.S. board. The spelling of the state—Hawaii—still differs from that of the island: Hawai’i.
“During the long period of toponymic stewardship, the Board has been praised, ridiculed, and ignored,” wrote Donald J. Orth, once the Board’s executive secretary, in a 1990 article in the journal Names (Vol. 3, No. 38). “It has locked horns with presidents, cabinet officers, congressmen, special interest groups, and persevering individuals. There have been victories and some defeats.”
The Denali/Mount McKinley Squabble
Among the board’s most prominent cases was the Denali-Mount McKinley naming conflict in Alaska, which regained attention with Trump’s executive order.
The mountain’s name was officially set in 1917 with a law making it Mount McKinley, for former President William McKinley. But Alaskans historically called it “Denali,” which originates from the Athabascan people who lived there and translates roughly to “The Great One.” Alaska in the 1970s petitioned the board to rename the peak, but the effort was blocked by lawmakers in Ohio, McKinley’s home state.
A name change to Denali finally happened in 2015 when then Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said she was authorized to make the change.
That was reversed in January by Trump’s executive order changing the peak’s name back to “Mount McKinley.”
Mapping the ‘Gulf of America’
In the same executive order, Trump also changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America. But this applies only within the United States, and some foreign leaders said they don’t plan to follow suit.
The name Gulf of Mexico became common on European maps in the 16th century. Surrounded by the United States, Canada and Cuba, the body of water previously had names ranging from the Gulf of Florida to the Gulf of Cortés, according to The New York Times.
Mapmakers and settlers called it the Gulf of Mexico more than two centuries before the official 1821 founding of the country of Mexico, a name rooted in Aztec language.
The Board on Geographic Names has updated the name to Gulf of America in the government’s geographic naming database and on maps and other documents. Navigation apps—and the media—are deciding how to adapt.
