Wisconsin has a village which is just plain Plain. ![]()
Electra, Texas was named for Electra Waggoner, the heiress to the estate of the founder of the town. Electra Waggoner Biggs, her granddaughter, went on to become famous as an artist and socialite, and friend of a GM executive, who named the Buick Electra after her.
Seldom Seen, Ontario; in the township of Whitchurch-Stouffville.
I once lived in Stouffville (the township capital), and heard about Seldom Seen, the village nobody has a need to visit. One day, when I had nothing better to do, I set out to find it. I found it, at the north end of McCowan Road, where the road stops because of a wide ravine. But it’s a village, with houses and people living there, though there were no stores or amenities. No problem; it’s close enough to Stouffville that residents can go there for things. But, because there’s no real reason to go to Seldom Seen, it remains … Seldom Seen.
That’s not a boring name. That’s a name worthy of being the title of a Manowar song.
The most boringly ordinary town name in South Dakota has to be Interior, which is located near the Badlands.
It also has a history of previous boring names, dating back to the Lakota name makȟóšiča otȟúŋwahe, which reportedly translates to “Badlands village”.
There is a photo of me standing next to the Interior city jail, which is also…boring.
There’s a hamlet in Wales called City.
After several suggested names were rejected by the post office for already being in use, the town of Nameless, TX was born.
Not the only one. There’s another Whynot in Mississippi, Wynot’s in Nebraska and Saskatchewan, and a Ynot in Montana.
There’s a fair number of such names in the US. At least one, and I think two, named 76 (reference to 1776, of course) and someone else cited 84 upthread. If anyone wants I think I could find a list.
How about one without the name of the nearby city? That is, just the direction?
It’s actually near the northeast corner of Maryland, but I don’t think that’s the origin of the name.
There’s also a North East, Pennsylvania, near Erie, where I stopped for lunch a few times in the early 1990s. Wikipedia says it was named for being in the northeastern corner of its county.
And there’s Southeast, New York, probably best known as the terminus of the Metro-North Railroad’s Harlem Line (for trains not continuing to Wassaic).
I’ve never visited the thumb area, so I can’t say much about Bad Axe. But the name originates from an old axe found embedded in a tree by early surveyors who named the corner, bad axe corners.

Or West, Texas, which is closer to the east part of state than the west part
And damn you, Wikipedia for ruining another good story. Local legend was that it was named West because that’s as far west as the Czech settlers wanted to go
Uncertain, Texas
Which I’ve been to.
Yep. People not reading the thread title, original post or any of the posts after that. ![]()
But only for figurative meanings of ‘literally’. There’s no town name found in every state. The closest is Riverside, which is found in 46 states. There’s no Riverside in Alaska, Hawaii, Louisiana, and Oklahoma.
There’s a medium-size city in Israel whose name translates as “Streets” in modern Hebrew - Rehovot.
Its name is actually an interesting case of linguistic drift. The root RHB in Hebrew means “Wide, Broad”, and the original biblical Rehovot (usually written “Rehoboth” in English) meant “open spaces”. However, in post-Biblical Hebrew, the word “rehovot” started referring specifically to the wide spaces between buildings in a city, i.e. streets (and not, say, alleyways), and thus the meaning of the word changed from any open spaces, to just streets, leaving the city with a rather silly name. Hebrew-speakers compensate for this by pronouncing the words differently: re-HO-vot for the city, and re-ho-VOT for the noun.
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Which station used to be called Brewster North, because it was directly north of Brewster. Now you take the Harlem line due north to end up in Southeast. ![]()
in CA;
Palmdale … was supposedly nothing but palm trees when first settled … and Lancaster because supposedly the guy who was sent to supervise the building of the train station/railroad was British and missed his hometown …
In grade school, it was set up where once a year the grade school kids from Lancaster UK, and here would exchange letters…
And the whole region is named "antelope valley " because passing cowboys used to tell of an antelope herd that lived on a patch of grass in the desert …
Another Texas city - El Paso means “the pass”
There’s a few dull lady’s names in Vic. Apart from Doreen (which I reckon wins the prize) there’s also Elaine and Meredith in the south west of the state.
None of them rise to the sheer banality of Speed or Research though.