Yes, I knew about these. They were in the arcticle about reversed place names I wrote about 20 years ago. There’s a similar pair of towns in Pennsylvania that were company towns – I forget their names off-hand. Oh, I remember, Revloc and Colver.
Technically, a reversal is an anagram, just one that has more stringent restrictions. So I’m thinking now I’ll break out the anagram list and put it in a second list with the reversals and leave the acronyms and acrostics together.
Ah, of course. Forgot all about those (although actually I only knew about the first two). Yes, those are good. As for the street names suggested above, right now I’m thinking that’s too low a level of geographic location. I’ll keep them in mind if I decide to expand the category. Or maybe someone else will add them once this goes prime-time (i.e. gets made into a regular wiki page).
There are other city neighborhoods that have names that might qualify, even if most of them are marketing creations. Like SoBe for the South Beach neighborhood of Miami, or SoMa for the South of Market area of San Francisco.
These are all good and I’ve added them. Appreciate the additions.
Also added some of the neighborhood ones. I’'ll get around to the others soon. Probably want to put a note about how many of them are not in common use but were mainly coined for real estate marketing purposes.
Not a place name but a region - when I lived in Aw Benny, Georgia, the locals referred to the area as SOWEGA for SOuth WEst GA and when I lived in Wilmington, NC, they referred to the area as SENCLAND for SouthEast North Carolina Land before they gave up on that.
When former Washington Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke had his new stadium built in Landover, MD, the complex was big enough to warrant its own zip code.
This being the case, they allowed Cooke to come up with a city name to match the zip code. Cooke came up with the unbelievably stupid “Raljon” to commemorate his two sons, Ralph and John.
Say what you want about current owner Dan Snyder but he at least had the good sense to get rid of the name and allow Landover some modicum of credit.
Across the river from St. Louis, there’s a municipality originally called Alcoa, then incorporated as Alorton (Aluminum Ore Town.)
Mokane, Mo. was a stop for the Missouri Kansas & Eastern Railway.
The folks in Oklahoma seem to like this a lot. There’s Lake Texoma, Arkoma, Texola (which had been called both Texokla and Texoma), not to be confused with Texhoma.
And Texarkana, Texas and Arkansas (and LouisiANA) as well as the tiny state line village of Arkana, Louisiana.
Mexicali is just across the U.S.-Mexico border from Calexico.
Nah, I’ll skip these. I want things that could reasonably be called a city, town, or village. I’ll extend that to townships or the equivalent in other countries (municipalities, communes, civil parishes, etc.) I don’t want anything bigger. I did put a couple lakes on the list, but am not sure I’ll keep them.
These two are good.
I mentioned these state name portmanteaus upthread. There’s already a list of them on Wikipedia and I don’t see any point in duplicating it. It’s a lot easier to just give a link to it. So I’m restricting the state name blends to those that have at least 3 states blended. There’s only a handful of those. I haven’t added Texarkana yet, but I knew about it.
How about a country name that’s an acronym? From the Wikipedia article on Pakistan, “The name of the country was coined in 1933 as Pakstan by Choudhry Rahmat Ali, a Pakistan Movement activist, who published it in his pamphlet Now or Never, using it as an acronym (“thirty million Muslim brethren who live in PAKSTAN”) referring to the names of the five northern regions of the British Raj: Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh, and Baluchistan. The letter i was incorporated to ease pronunciation and form the linguistically correct, meaningful, and colorful name.”
People who live in Orange County, California, are familiar with Katella Boulevard, which is a major east-west thoroughfare. The County bought the land for it from a farmer who exacted a promise that the street would be named after his two daughters: Kate and Ella.
I was aware of Pakistan, but see my comments above about this being about cities, towns, etc. As far as street names, I’ve already mentioned those too.
Another thing is that I don’t want this list to get out of hand size-wise. So for blends of randoms names, I’m only going to list those derived three or more of them. Strictly speaking, blends of just two words or names are portmanteaus. There’s lots of those that I run across but I don’t feel like listing them. If anyone wants such a list, feel free to create a page yourself.
A Florida retirement community is named Nalcrest, which stands for National Association of Letter Carriers Retirement, Education, Security and Training. I first became aware of the community courtesy of a trivia item that mentioned that, as might be expected of a place that catered to ex-postal workers, no dogs are allowed.
The town of Germfask, in Upper Michigan, was so named as the least ludicrous pronounceable combination of the initial letters of the surnames of the eight original settlers who founded the town.
Similarly, Hemaruka, Alberta, was so named by the founder, whose daughters were HElen, MArgaret RUth and KAthleen.
Nalcrest, Germfask, Hemaruka: all good additions. Thank you very much.
I’ve been thinking about the title and decided to change from “acrostics” to “initialisms”. The former was not quite right; the latter is a vaguer term that fits, although it could also mean acronyms. I’ll explain the difference as I’m using the terms here.
I found a way to find some of these. There’s a number of books that have etymologies of place names, each usually about those within a single state/province. Most are on googlebooks or another site with old texts and have a search function. I can search for terms like “initials” and “letters” on those. Doesn’t always find all of them and the search function can be flakey at times, but it’s better than nothing.
Not towns, but Honduras has a bunch of new county-sized territories (called *concejos territoriales *in Spanish), in the indigenous Muskitia region (Mosquito Coast), and their names are mostly portmanteau blends of (usually) two or three major towns/villages within them.