I gotta go with Lake Gichigoomie and I’m glad that Gordon Lightfoot including it in the song. I also thought that “Lightfoot” was a Native American name but it seems it is of Scottish descent. A decent percentage of towns and counties along Lake Erie are Nat Am names.
There’s always Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
“Gitche Gumee”, by the by, is the real Ojibwe name for Lake Superior, meaning “great sea”, according to Wikipedia
The Ojibwe name for the lake is gichi-gami (in syllabics: ᑭᒋᑲᒥ, pronounced gitchi-gami or kitchi-gami in different dialects),[16] meaning “great sea”. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote this name as “Gitche Gumee” in the poem The Song of Hiawatha, as did Gordon Lightfoot in his song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”.
According to other sources, the full Ojibwe name is ᐅᒋᑉᐧᐁ ᑭᒋᑲᒥ Ojibwe Gichigami (“Ojibwe’s Great Sea”) or ᐊᓂᐦᔑᓈᐯ ᑭᒋᑲᒥ Anishinaabe Gichigami (“Anishinaabe’s Great Sea”).[17] The 1878 dictionary by Father Frederic Baraga, the first one written for the Ojibway language, gives the Ojibwe name as Otchipwe-kitchi-gami (a transliteration of Ojibwe Gichigami).[16]
“Native American” in its broadest sense, Lake Titicaca always makes me giggle.
I always liked “Monongahela” – just fun to say.
I’m a fan of Lake Memphremagog on the VT/QC border.
Not a lake, but you did say “or place”, I’m fond of the simple literalness of Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump.
First thing I thought of upon reading the title.
what’s the Indian word for Ninja?
I’ve always liked how “Kalamazoo” rolls off the tongue.
A like a lot of Western New York names because I heard them so often growing up. More than just nostalgia: I thought they were neat sounding even then.
I guess my favorite is the Town of Tonawanda. The alliteration just makes it sound so great to hear.
I’m still convinced that “Cayuga” and all the other names that sound like it just mean “lake.” We’ve got Cayuga, Keuka, Cayuta, even Canadaigua is close enough that it might just have been someone mumbling.
But my favorite is Taughannock Falls. Nobody (who’s from away (showing my Maine roots there)) knows how to pronounce it.
I’ll see you and raise you Skaneateles.
Skookumchuck
“Cuyahoga”, as in the county that Cleveland is in and (originally) the river that bisects the town, means “Crooked”. Because the river is even more irregular than most.
I always liked ‘Mississippi’. Not so much for the word itself, but spelling it out loud was a fun exercise for grade-school me.
Lake Pottawattamie makes the ten-year-old in me smirk.
My guess would be something like tuh-GAN-ick. Am I close?
I’ve crossed over the Wateree river a lot while traveling to the sandee shore of the waveee ocean.
My wife’s Aunt had a house on Lake Wawasee in northern Indiana. Wawasee, it’s fun to say.