Thousands of names on today’s world map come from Indigenous languages: Canada from the St. Lawrence Iroquoian kanata (“village”), the Mississippi from the Ojibwe Misi-ziibi (“Great River”), Chicago from the Miami–Illinois šikaakwa (a wild onion), Quebec from the Algonquin Kébec (“where the river narrows”) and Iqaluit from the Inuktitut for “place of many fish”. In the United States alone, 25 of the 50 state names come from Indigenous languages, 24 of them from Native American languages and one, Hawaii, from Hawaiian. Colonial mapmakers borrowed some names and overwrote others, and since the 1980s Canada, Australia and New Zealand have restored many; below is that history in order, then the list today.
Kanata, 1535: Jacques Cartier records a country’s future name
The best-documented early case is the name of a country. In 1535, on his second voyage up the Saint Lawrence, the French navigator Jacques Cartier was directed by local people to the village of Stadacona, on the site of present-day Quebec City. They used the word kanata, which in their Laurentian (St. Lawrence Iroquoian) language meant “village” or “settlement”. Cartier recorded the word in his account of the 1535–1536 voyage, and then stretched it: he applied “Canada” not just to Stadacona but to the whole area under its chief, Donnacona. By 1545 European books and maps were using Canada for a small region along the Saint Lawrence River.
The Laurentian language itself is now extinct; the St. Lawrence Iroquoians Cartier met appear to have left or disappeared from the valley some time before 1580, and Samuel de Champlain found no sign of habitation there in the early 1600s. Their word survived anyway. It named the French colony along the river, then the British colonies of Upper and Lower Canada created in 1791, the united Province of Canada in 1841, and finally the country that was formed at Confederation in 1867. Our post on why Canada is called Canada weighs the rival theories.
Kébec, Taronto and Checagou: names borrowed in the 1600s
When Champlain founded a settlement on the Saint Lawrence in 1608, he kept the Algonquin name for the spot, Kébec, “where the river narrows”, which describes exactly what the river does below the promontory of Cap Diamant.
Toronto is a case of a name that moved. The Mohawk word tkaronto, “where there are trees standing in the water”, referred to the narrows between Lake Simcoe and Lake Couchiching, near present-day Orillia, where the Wendat had planted saplings in the water to corral fish. Champlain recorded the name as early as 1615. French maps then attached “Toronto” to several places, including Georgian Bay, Lake Simcoe and various rivers, and the portage from Lake Ontario to Lake Huron became the Toronto Carrying-Place Trail. The name drifted south along that trail until it settled on the city at its Lake Ontario end, far from the fish weir it first described.
Chicago followed. Around 1679 the French explorer René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle referred to the site as “Checagou” in a memoir. The source is the Miami–Illinois word šikaakwa, the name for Allium tricoccum, a wild relative of onion and garlic. In 1687 Henri Joutel noted the “garlic” growing there in quantity. Mississippi comes from Misi zipi, the French rendering of the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) Misi-ziibi, “Great River”.
Borrowed names kept arriving long after the first contacts. The city of Ottawa took its name in 1855 from the Ottawa River, whose name derives from the Algonquin adawe, “to trade”. In New England, Massachusetts takes its name from the Massachusett people, probably from the Wôpanâak muswachasut, “near the great hill”, meaning the Blue Hills.
Queen Charlotte, Cook and Ayers: the replacement era, 1770–1917
The other habit was to rename a place after a patron, a ship or a politician:
- 1770 – James Cook named the volcano on New Zealand’s North Island Mount Egmont, after John Perceval, 2nd Earl of Egmont, a former First Lord of the Admiralty. Māori knew it as Taranaki.
- 1787 – George Dixon surveyed the archipelago off northern British Columbia and named it the Queen Charlotte Islands, after his ship, itself named after the wife of George III.
- 1847 – European settlers named the large sand island off Queensland Fraser Island, after Captain James Fraser of the Stirling Castle, who was shipwrecked and died there in 1836. The Butchulla people called it K’gari.
- 1851 – Captain John Lort Stokes named New Zealand’s highest mountain Mount Cook, though Cook himself never sighted it. Its Ngāi Tahu name was Aoraki.
- 1873 – On 19 July, the surveyor William Gosse sighted the great sandstone monolith of central Australia and named it Ayers Rock, after Sir Henry Ayers, Chief Secretary of South Australia. To the Aṉangu it was Uluṟu.
- 1896 – The gold prospector William Dickey named Alaska’s great peak after the presidential candidate William McKinley. The Koyukon called it Denali, from a word for “high” or “tall”; under Russian rule it had been Bolshaya Gora, “big mountain”, a translation of that name.
The twentieth century added military and administrative names. In 1942 the United States built Frobisher Bay Air Base on Baffin Island, on a fishing site Inuit and their predecessors had used for thousands of years, and the settlement that grew around it took the name of the bay. In 1917 Congress passed the Mount McKinley National Park Act, which made the prospector’s name the federal one.
From Iqaluit to Taranaki Maunga, 1986–2025: the names that came back
The reversal began in the 1980s, usually through land-claim settlements or reconciliation agreements. In date order:
Mount Taranaki, 1986. On 29 May 1986 a decision by the Minister of Lands, Koro Wētere, made the official name “Mount Taranaki or Mount Egmont”. A fuller change came later (see below).
Iqaluit, 1987. On 1 January 1987 the municipality of Frobisher Bay became Iqaluit, the Inuktitut ᐃᖃᓗᐃᑦ, “place of many fish”, matching what its Inuit residents had always called it. Twelve years later, on 1 April 1999, Iqaluit became the capital of Nunavut, the new territory created for Inuit self-government, whose official languages include Inuktitut and Inuinnaqtun.
Uluru, 1993 and 2002. The Australian government returned ownership of Uluru to its traditional owners on 26 October 1985, on condition that it be leased back to the national parks agency for 99 years. A dual-naming policy followed in 1993, and on 15 December 1993 the rock became “Ayers Rock / Uluru”, the first official dual-named feature in the Northern Territory. On 6 November 2002, at the request of the Regional Tourism Association in Alice Springs, the order was reversed to “Uluru / Ayers Rock”. In Pitjantjatjara, Uluṟu is a proper noun with no further meaning; senior traditional owners also use it as a family name. The Uluru landmark guide covers the rock itself.
Aoraki / Mount Cook, 1998. In 1998 the Ngāi Tahu Claims Settlement Act amended a number of South Island place names to include their Māori names. Mount Cook became Aoraki / Mount Cook, the only one of those names in which the Māori form comes first. The popular gloss “cloud piercer” is a romantic rendering of the parts ao and raki, not a settled translation.
Haida Gwaii, 2010. On 3 June 2010 the Haida Gwaii Reconciliation Act formally replaced the Queen Charlotte Islands with Haida Gwaii, “islands of the Haida people”, as part of a reconciliation protocol between British Columbia and the Haida. Strictly, it is a new Haida coinage of the early 1980s, not a revived one.
Denali, 2015. In late August 2015 the US Department of the Interior changed the federal name of North America’s highest peak, 6,190 m (20,310 ft), to Denali. Alaska had used that name officially since 1975, but its request for a federal change had been blocked for decades.
K’gari, 2023. On 7 June 2023 the Queensland government officially renamed Fraser Island K’gari, the Butchulla name, translated as “paradise”.
Taranaki Maunga, 2025. Under a Treaty of Waitangi settlement with Ngā Iwi o Taranaki, initialled on 31 March 2023, the mountain’s official name became Taranaki Maunga on 1 April 2025, dropping Egmont from the official form.
Denali to Mount McKinley: a name that left the list again
Restoration is not always permanent. In January 2025 the Department of the Interior, under the Trump administration, reverted the federal name of Denali to Mount McKinley. The State of Alaska’s own name, Denali, set by the Alaska Board of Geographic Names in 1975, was not affected, and the national park keeps the name Denali National Park and Preserve. The split between state and federal names that existed from 1975 to 2015 has returned. We look at the arguments on each side in why Denali was renamed Mount McKinley.
The 25 US state names from Indigenous languages today
The largest single group of Indigenous names in everyday use is the list of US states. According to the Wikipedia compilation of state name etymologies, the names of 24 states derive from Indigenous languages of the Americas and one, Hawaii, from Hawaiian. Of the 24, eight come from Algonquian languages (Massachusetts among them), seven from Siouan languages (one, by way of Miami–Illinois), three from Iroquoian languages, two from Muskogean languages, and one each from a Caddoan, an Eskimo–Aleut, a Uto-Aztecan, and either an Athabaskan or Uto-Aztecan language. Twenty state names come from European languages, and the origins of five, Arizona, Idaho, Maine, Oregon and Rhode Island, are disputed or unclear.
Beyond the states, today’s Indigenous names fall into a few recognisable groups:
- Countries. Canada (kanata) and Mexico, whose name goes back to the Nahuatl Mēxihco. For Mexico there is still no consensus on the meaning; proposed readings include “place in the navel of the moon” and “place in the middle of the century plant”.
- Rivers and lakes. The Mississippi, the Ottawa, and the many Algonquian river names of the eastern United States and Canada.
- Cities. Chicago, Toronto, Quebec City, Ottawa and Iqaluit, each with a source word that described a plant, a fish weir, a narrowing river, trade or fish.
- Dual and restored names. Uluru / Ayers Rock, Aoraki / Mount Cook, Taranaki Maunga, Haida Gwaii and K’gari.
- Whole countries’ second names. Aotearoa, originally the Māori name for the North Island only, has spread since the late twentieth century into the bilingual names of New Zealand institutions and the Māori verse of the national anthem. Its original meaning is not known; “land of the long white cloud” is the popular translation, not a certain one.
Translations printed on signs are often simplifications: Uluṟu has no meaning beyond the name, and the meanings of Aotearoa and Mexico are uncertain. The official forms are set by named bodies such as the US Board on Geographic Names and the New Zealand Geographic Board, often under statutes like the Ngāi Tahu Claims Settlement Act; our explainer on who decides place names shows how those bodies work.