Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Wednesday Search Challenge (June 23, 2010) - Pennsylvania River Names?

Last week I was driving through Pennsylvania, crossing the state when I noticed something interesting and odd--many of the streams and rivers seem to end in -kill.  Consider... the Fishkill River, the Schuylkill River and so on.  


So I naturally started wondering--Why are PA rivers given names like that?  Were there a succession of "kills" of various kinds of fish (a la "Fishkill"), or is it something else? 


It's a good search problem.  Not terribly hard, methinks, but an interesting one.  


How would you solve this search problem?  Why such odd names?  


Search on! 

5 comments:

  1. I searched for "suffix kill" (no quotes) and found references to kill and Dutch. You said you were in Pennsylvania which has a large Dutch heritage. The suffix -kill or -kil in Dutch means either waterway or river as found in the examples here https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_tautological_place_names

    ReplyDelete
  2. the "kill" in these river names is Netherlands Dutch, not to be confused with PA Dutch.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Just an added note - even though you included -kill in your blog post, you can't include the minus sign in your search on Google. The minus sign will remove the word from your search in Google. :-)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Excellent!

    You're right... you can NOT include the minus sign in your search, as it will exclude those results!

    ReplyDelete
  5. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete