Everyone knows places in their own countries that have strange or silly names… so let's hear 'em!

-not names that you “know of” in other countries mind you! Rather: in your OWN country.


I'll go first… Many Australian towns are based on old local aboriginal terms, which makes them sound a little strange:

Wadonga,
Wagga-Wagga
Dog-Swamp
koolyanobbing -pronounced “Cool ya nobbing”
Gingin -pronounced “jin-jin”
Cockburn -unfortunately it's pronounced “co-burn” which is less funny :(
Cock Wash
Chinaman's Knob
Humpybong
Innaloo
Mount Buggery (buggery means anal sex)
Useless loop
Nowhere Else
Dismal Swamp

Chinaman's Knob? Mount Buggery? Unless you are making these up, what possible hope could anyone have of competing?!

The closest I could think of to me is Pratts Bottom, but it's a non starter compared to Humpybong!

Mind you, there's Ponders End?

Hmm, well there's a Foggy Bottom in DC :] A famous American one is Big Bone Lick. Idaho in particular has a Slickpoo and

Out in the western US they gave places rather literal names, like Mudhole and whatnot. Nothing, Boneyard, Tombstone, Two Guns, um…

There's lots of ‘Ends’ in England, there must be some good ones. There's also some upons and unders and overs, but those all would depend on the rivers' names…

I'm sure I saw a Jolly Bottom when I went to Cornwall!

Edit: Didn't finish my other sentence! Slickpoo and Shite Creek, Idaho

I work in Piscataway — practically a sentence, but that's nothing compared to Pennsylvania (heh heh):

Schwenksville
Virginville
New Freedom
Slippery Rock
Intercourse
Mount Pleasant
Mount Joy
Picture Rocks
Shamokin Dam
Nanty-glo

And Philadelphia means the state of brotherly love. Dem Quakers

A town in my home state of WV made national news recently: Fort Gay

Personally, my favorite town name ever is Big Ugly, WV. It makes for funny headlines “Big Ugly Woman wins state pageant” and so on.

WV also has

Tornado
Hurricane – pronounced “her-kin”
Thursday
Odd
Needmore
Looneyville
Left Hand
Burnt House
Booger Hole

A town nearby here in VA is called Phenix. I was hoping it was pronounced “fenix” but alas, it's the same as “Phoenix” just spelled hick-style. Sigh. And I cross “Difficult Creek” on my way to work every day.

Welcome to Muff.

“Lynchburg and Humptulips”

'nuff said.

Byth1
“Lynchburg and Humptulips”

'nuff said.

I live near Lynchburg. :)

I found out that the town was named after the man for whom the verb “lynch” was named.

usedbooks
A town nearby here in VA is called Phenix. I was hoping it was pronounced “fenix” but alas, it's the same as “Phoenix” just spelled hick-style. Sigh.

As much as I like silly names, I like normal-looking names that the locals put their own spin on. Like
Pierre, SD (pronounced “peer” )
Worcester, MA (pronounced “wuhster” )
Norfolk, VA (pronounced “nufik” )

PS. Big Ugly is great ")

This is just from one province, mind you.

Elbow
Eyebrow
Surprise
McGee
Glenellen (go on, say it; it's fun!)
Primate
Resource
Lens
Neptune
Radville
Adanac (quite possibly the least creative town name ever, especially since this town is located in Canada)
Stonehenge

To be fair, though, some of the town names are translations of what the Native Canadians called the area.

ayesinback
I work in Piscataway — practically a sentence, (heh heh):

Piss-the-cat-away I lived across the Raritan in New Brumfuss (New Brunswick)

Newark (New-erk) New Jersey versus Newark (New Ark) Delaware
Schenectady, NY
Frelinghuysen, NJ (ask ten people how to pronounce it and get ten different answers!)
Hell, Michigan (so named because the guy wanted Hell to freeze over?)
Dunellen, NJ (say it as a question)
North, East, South and New Brunswick NJ (and they're all within 20 miles of each other. Couldn't they have thought up another name? What do you mean there is no West Brunswick?)

I have no idea where West Brunswick is either, Bravo. I've asked the question of many, but we seem to suspect it was devoured by its larger cousins.

Intercourse is in Pennsylvania
Blue Ball, which is Pennsylvania and Ohio

I want to live in “Radville”

Dildo, Newfoundland
Ass Bend, Newfoundland

Some quite vulgar ones from Jolly Olde England:

-Gropecunt Lane

-Tickle Cock Bridge

The second one is so iconic, that when the city it's in tried to rename it after building a new bridge, local residents were pissed, and the original name remained.

EDIT - There's one I forgot to mention closer to where I live: The unincorporated village of Waldo, Wisconsin.

Hm…unfortunately I'm not aware of too many places that would be on par in amusement with the ones already mentioned, but here's some interesting ones in California…

Vacaville. Just look up the Spanish translation.

Placentia. I'd be curious to know the origins behind this city.

And for streets: Traffic Way. Why anyone would want to travel down such a street is beyond me. Businesses would probably be terrified to set up there.

I've visited Loonyville, TX before. You never know when you are there because someone is always stealing the “Welcome to Loonyville” sign.

The name of the city in my area isn't funny, but the name is so long that no one bothers putting the city's full name on address labels. If you want to send a letter to North Richland Hills, you usually send it to NRH or Fort Worth.

And my church had a snake problem once so they named a street “St Patrick's Way.” Now there are no more snakes.

Another street at the church is “Jesus is the Way.” (I wish I was making this up. I've seen the signs.)


And, for the sake of a terrible joke, may I ask: Where is Waldo, Wisconsin?

ayesinback
I work in Piscataway — practically a sentence, but that's nothing compared to Pennsylvania (heh heh):

Schwenksville
Virginville
New Freedom
Slippery Rock
Intercourse
Mount Pleasant
Mount Joy
Picture Rocks
Shamokin Dam
Nanty-glo

And Philadelphia means the state of brotherly love. Dem Quakers

Don't forget “THROOP”, which is pronounced “Troop”

ayesinback
Schwenksville
Virginville
New Freedom
Slippery Rock
Intercourse
Mount Pleasant
Mount Joy
Picture Rocks
Shamokin Dam
Nanty-glo

Mount Pleasant was stuck in Virginville, then it learned about New Freedom, met Mount Joy and they shared a Slippery Rock at Intercourse. After that it was all Nanty-glo at Shamokin Dam.

North Dakota's weird town names:
Antler
Colgate
Concrete
Hoopla
Voltaire
Zap
Ark
Devil's Lake
Can Do
Ray

that's tame compared to others, I'm afraid. ah well.

I actually looked into Texas names and I turned up:

Gun Sight
Gun Barrel City
Point Blank
Cut and Shoot
Elysian Fields
Utopia
Paradise
Coffee City
Telephone
Telegraph
Energy
Raisin
Oatmeal
Rice
Noodle
Levelland
Horizon City
Sundown
Chickenfeather
Grannie's Neck
Goober Hill

It's a Telegraph Hill in Tennessee and was a location in Civil War history. It's so named because there were telegraph wires going across the hill. Round Top and Little Round Top are hills that are round and Little Round Top is the smaller of the two. So some guy who may have been half in the bag called it something and it stuck. Cemetary and Seminary Hills were so-named because that was what was on the hill.

A lot of silly sounding place names are literal. Maine is supposedly named because an early explorer (IIRC Captain John Smith who charted most of the coast of New England) said it was the Main land and not an island. Most Native American names are literal.


I've always thought that anything that was “New” is a silly name, couldn't you think of anything original? Newfoundland? Isn't everything on this continent new found land?

Nova Scotia! Let's hide the dumb name New Scotland by recording it in Latin and we all know Scots are too stupid to read Latin so they'll never know we named something after Scotland.

The people who named these things definitely had a sense of humor or were drunk at the time.

I'd say more “Fun names” than “Silly”, Oz. I love saying places named by native Americans. One that sticks out is Wapakoneta in Ohio. I'm not from Ohio, but I've spent a lot of time there. My favorite road name is also from there. “Needmore Road” in Dayton Ohio. Especially when it's under construction.

Another native place name that I like to say is Tehachapi. It's also not the easiest to pronounce unless you've heard it said. It must have first been spelled by the Spanish missionaries, since its English spelling is not intuitive to its sound. teh HA cheh pee

Then there's the street I grew up on. Etowah. It's pronounced ee-TAO-ah, but we all called it EH-toe-uh.

Places I used to mark in my log books when I was driving out of state and just happened to have truck stops in them…

Wamsutter, Wyoming
Minooka, Illinois
Eufaula, Oklahoma
Tucumcari, New Mexico
Ogilala, Nebraska
Bangor, Maine (Home of Stephen King)
Ashtabula, Ohio
Pocatello, Idaho

Driving through Virginia, I once saw an exit sign for a town called Manassas. I BELIEVE it's pronounced “muh-NASS-is”, but that's a lot less fun than “Man Asses”.

I live in New York, though, and not Virginia, so I should be posting New York towns. Furthermore I live within spitting distance of That One City in New York, so I don't actually know any New York towns (Upstate New York? What's that?).

Apparently there's a town in New York called Butternuts.

There's also a town called Germantown. So it's Germantown Town?

Oh yeah, and there's all the “kill”s. Catskill, Fishkill, Peekskill. Someone was feeling violent. Okay I know that's not where the name comes from, but you know.

Manassas is another Civil War attraction with two battles fought there. Yankees called after the river: Bull Run. It's also pronounced Man-ass-ses.

Virginia towns for for the faint hearted:
Norfolk and Suffolk properly pronounced Na-FUK and Sah-FUK
I've watched people turn beet red when encountering locals pronouncing the names.

Germantown is a funny place because it was named by the neighbors not the inhabitants. The people settled there were German settlers in the 18th Century and the neighbors took to calling it Germantown because the Germans lived there. Damned foreign immigrants not fitting in and speaking their own language and taking jobs from honest native residents of Pennsylvania…

Kill as in Schuykill comes from “kill” which is Dutch for a creek or river. So when you say Schuykill river you are saying “Hidden or hideout creek river”

Then there are things named for famous people that no one knows how to pronounce. Like the Tadeusz Kosciuszko bridge. Only if you can speak a Slavic language do you even come close.

Another Indian name: Metedeconk, NJ

Hope this isn't considered necroing.

There's the usual names like Selma, Autauga, Wetumpka, and all the other Native American names. And the usual literal and western names, like Gulf Shores, Montgomery, and Birmingham. But the most memorable name of an Alabama town has got to be Slapout. Yes there is a town called Slapout, Alabama. It's to the East of Wetumpka.

Alabama
-Blackman
- Bravo
- Brilliant
- Burnt Corn
- Climax
-Five Forks
- Gay Meadows
-Intercourse
-Seman
Alaska
- Queer Creek
- Unalaska
Arizona
- Why
District of Columbia
- Murder Bay - (How accurate)
Indiana
- Ballstown
- Hooker Corner
- Santa Claus

Found two more in south Jersey this weekend.

Coxs Corner and Imlaystown, both on the same exit.

There's a town called Burnt Church here in New Brunswick. The Indians burned 3 churches down, lol.