Case 007: The Letter Under Review

Exhibit A · Folio 1 of 4

Five Lakes, One Word

Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior. HOMES. Somewhere around the fourth grade an American child is handed this word, and it never leaves. No song, no chart, no flashcards. Five of the largest bodies of fresh water on the planet, filed under a single five-letter noun that also happens to mean the warmest thing in the language.

It is a small masterpiece of national engineering, and nobody signed it. There is no documented inventor of HOMES, no patent, no first printing anyone can point to with confidence. It simply appeared in classrooms and stayed, the way good tools do. The Department has reviewed the alternatives. There are no alternatives.

But a mnemonic is a contract with the map. It works only as long as all five lakes agree to keep their initials. And American place names have always been living things, entered and revisited and restored across four centuries of charts.

Exhibit B · Folio 2 of 4

The Republic of Second Drafts

America renames things. Not occasionally, not recently: constantly, and from the beginning. On September 8, 1664, an English fleet took a Dutch trading town at the bottom of Manhattan, and New Amsterdam became New York before the ink was dry on the surrender. Nine years later the Dutch sailed back in and renamed it again. For roughly fifteen months, the future capital of American commerce was called New Orange.

The habit never stopped. In 1950 the town of Hot Springs, New Mexico, changed its name to Truth or Consequences because a radio host promised to broadcast his tenth-anniversary show from the first town that would do it. The town figured it would switch back afterward. It never did; it votes to keep the name to this day.

Then there is the case the Department finds most instructive. Six days after the assassination, on November 28, 1963, President Johnson announced that Cape Canaveral would become Cape Kennedy. It was meant as an honor and received as one. It also replaced a Spanish place name that had been on the charts since the sixteenth century, and Florida never quite took to the change. In 1973 the state legislature asked for the old name back, and on October 9 the United States Board on Geographic Names agreed. The cape is Canaveral again. The space center is still Kennedy. Everybody kept something.

And the ledger is still open. In January 2025, Executive Order 14172 restored the name Mount McKinley to the highest peak in North America and renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. The pattern is the point: the American map has never been a finished document. It is a working draft, and it always has been.

★ American Oddity

New York City has been renamed twice and un-renamed once. Dutch New Amsterdam became English New York in 1664, Dutch New Orange in 1673, and English New York again in 1674 under the Treaty of Westminster. Three names, one island, ten years. The Yankees dodged a bullet.

Exhibit C · Folio 3 of 4

The O Has Been Here Before

Which brings the file to the letter in question. Of the five lakes in HOMES, the O is the one with the thickest folder, because Lake Ontario has been renamed more times than any of its siblings and has beaten every one of them.

Samuel de Champlain put it on his 1632 map of New France as Lac de St. Louis, after the sainted French king; the cartographer Nicolas Sanson was still calling it that in 1656. In 1660 the Jesuit historian Francis Creuxius wrote Lacus Ontarius, and the word we use entered the record. The Relation des Jésuites of 1662–63 hedged its bets with “Lac Ontario ou des Iroquois,” printing a third option, Ondiara, in smaller type underneath, which is the seventeenth-century equivalent of a footnote saying we are not sure yet. In 1712 a French military engineer drew it as Lac Frontenac, honoring Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac, governor general of New France. Through the whole colonial period the Mohawk name Katarokwi was also in use, Frenchified on paper as Cataraqui.

Count them: St. Louis, Ontarius, Ondiara, Frontenac, Cataraqui. Five entries in eighty years, set down by explorers, Jesuits, cartographers and military engineers, each of them reasonably sure he had settled the question. By the early eighteenth century the charts had converged on Ontario, and Ontario is what it has been ever since.

Five names on file · two struck · one still standing

Exhibit CThe register: what the lake has been called, and by whom

Exhibit D · Folio 4 of 4

Already Great

Here is where the file closes itself. Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontarí’io. Translations vary, as they always do across four centuries and three languages, but the one you will meet most often in the reference works is the short one: great lake.

Which leaves the file with a very tidy piece of arithmetic. If you wanted this lake to carry a name that says something great about the country on its southern shore, you would not have to change a line. It already does, and it has since long before anyone thought to check. The paperwork, for once, was finished in advance.

Alaska offers the same pleasure. Denali, in Koyukon Athabascan, is usually given as the Great One; Mount McKinley honors the twenty-fifth president. The mountain has carried both names officially — McKinley from 1917, Denali from 2015, McKinley again from 2025 — and the national park around it keeps the name Denali. Two names, one mountain, and greatness on the label either way.

The Department’s finding is therefore unanimous and cheerful. HOMES is safe. The O stays. And here is why any of it matters: a country only cares this much about its names because it means them. Nobody keeps redrafting a map they are indifferent to. The revision history is the affection — and on this one line, the first draft already said it.

Pending revision. Revised to itself. File closed, cheerfully.

The Full Record

The Naming History of Lake Ontario, and the American Habit of Renaming the Map

HOMES — Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior — is the standard English-language mnemonic for the five Great Lakes. Its origin is not securely documented; it circulates through classroom practice rather than through any traceable first publication. The lake names themselves are a mixture of Indigenous, French and English coinages, and several of them were unsettled for the better part of a century after Europeans first charted the basin. Lake Ontario is the clearest case.

What Lake Ontario has been called

Samuel de Champlain’s 1632 map of New France labels the lake Lac de St. Louis; the cartographer Nicolas Sanson used the same name as late as 1656. In 1660 the Jesuit historian Francis Creuxius (François Du Creux) recorded Lacus Ontarius, the earliest widely cited appearance of the modern name. The Relation des Jésuites for 1662–63 gives “Lac Ontario ou des Iroquois,” with the variant Ondiara set in smaller type. A French military engineer’s map of 1712 names it Lac Frontenac, after Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac, governor general of New France. The Mohawk name Katarokwi was in parallel use and appears in French colonial sources as Cataraqui. The form “Ontario” had become the standard label on French maps by the early eighteenth century.

The etymology

Ontario derives from the Wendat (Huron) Ontarí’io. It is most often translated as “great lake,” though other renderings, including “beautiful lake” and “lake of shining waters,” appear in the literature. The province of Ontario, created in 1867, takes its name from the lake rather than the reverse.

Renaming in the United States: a partial ledger

New Amsterdam was surrendered to an English force on September 8, 1664 and renamed New York for the Duke of York. A Dutch squadron retook the city in 1673 and renamed it New Orange; the Treaty of Westminster returned it to English control and to the name New York in 1674. Hot Springs, New Mexico, adopted the name Truth or Consequences on March 31, 1950, after the radio programme of that name offered to broadcast its tenth-anniversary episode from the first town to do so; residents have voted to retain the name since. Cape Canaveral, Florida, was renamed Cape Kennedy following an announcement by President Lyndon Johnson on November 28, 1963; after opposition within Florida, the state legislature moved to restore the original, and the United States Board on Geographic Names recognised the return to Cape Canaveral on October 9, 1973. The NASA installation on Merritt Island retains the name John F. Kennedy Space Center.

Mount McKinley, so called after a prospector’s 1896 proposal and made official in 1917, was renamed Denali by Secretarial Order in 2015 after a campaign begun by the State of Alaska in 1975. Executive Order 14172, “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness,” signed January 20, 2025, directed the restoration of the name Mount McKinley and the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America; the Secretary of the Interior issued the implementing directives on February 7 and February 14, 2025. Denali National Park and Preserve retains its name.

Sources & further reading

Champlain, S. de (1632). Carte de la Nouvelle France. “Lac de St. Louis.”
Du Creux, F. (Creuxius) (1660). Historiae Canadensis. “Lacus Ontarius.”
Relation des Jésuites de la Nouvelle-France, 1662–63. “Lac Ontario ou des Iroquois”; Ondiara.
Rayburn, A. (1997). Place Names of Ontario. University of Toronto Press. Etymology of Ontario and the Cataraqui / Katarokwi forms.
Articles of Surrender of New Netherland (1664); Treaty of Westminster (1674).
City of Truth or Consequences, N.M.: municipal name change, March 31, 1950.
U.S. Board on Geographic Names: decision of October 9, 1973 restoring Cape Canaveral.
Executive Order 14172, “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness,” 90 Fed. Reg. 8629 (January 31, 2025); U.S. Department of the Interior implementing directives, February 2025.

The Letter Under Review