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!
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
ReplyDeletethe "kill" in these river names is Netherlands Dutch, not to be confused with PA Dutch.
ReplyDeleteJust 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. :-)
ReplyDeleteExcellent!
ReplyDeleteYou're right... you can NOT include the minus sign in your search, as it will exclude those results!