Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg, Lake

geographical name

Char·​gog·​ga·​gogg·​man·​chaug·​ga·​gogg·​chau·​bu·​na·​gun·​ga·​maugg, Lake chär-ˌgȯ-gə-ˌgȯg-man-ˌchȯ-gə-ˌgȯg-chȯ-ˌbə-nə-ˈgəŋ-gə-ˌmȯg 

variants or Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg

chär-ˌgȯ-gə-ˌgȯg-man-ˌchȯ-ˌgȯ-gə-ˌgȯg-chȯ-ˌbə-nə-ˈgəŋ-gə-ˌmȯg 

or Lake Chaubunagungamaug

chȯ-ˌbə-nə-ˈgəŋ-gə-ˌmȯg 

or Webster Lake

lake on the border with Connecticut in south central Massachusetts

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How to Spell the Longest Place Name in the United States

This lake, often noted as the longest place name in the U.S., formerly had the 49-letter spelling Chargoggagoggmanchauggauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg listed as the headword. The headword was recently updated to the 45-letter spelling Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg to match what is often used locally, including in a sign posted near the lake. The longer spelling and the shorter Chaubunagungamaug are also used, and are listed as spelling variants.

Word History

Etymology

Note: The polysyllabic name attributed to this lake began as a mapmaker's hoax. Chaubunakongkomuk was recorded in 1668 as the name of an Indigenous "praying town" adjoining a lake near what is now the town of Webster in south central Massachusetts. In the language of the Nipmucks, a New England Algonquian people, the name actually referred to the lake itself, and as Chaubunagungamaug it continued in use as the English name for the lake into the nineteenth century. But on a 1795 map of Massachusetts by the cartographer Osgood Carleton, the lake is labeled Chargoggagoggmanchoggagogg, a succession of nonsense syllables enclosing -manchog-, a spelling variant of Manchaug, the name of a different small lake to the north, which is unlabeled on Carleton's map. As if emphasizing the jocular nature of the name, the cartographer made it trail down across the Massachusetts state line into the mostly blank Connecticut portion of the map. In the nineteenth century an even longer name, Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg, was contrived by appending the real name, Chaubunagungamaug, to the fraudulent name. The historian and philologist James Hammond Trumbull, in Indian Names of Places, etc., in and on the Borders of Connecticut (Hartford, 1881), took Chaubunagungamaug to mean "boundary fishing place," though he does not demonstrate how he arrived at this sense. The linguist and Algonquian specialist Ives Goddard regards Trumbull's interpretation charitably as "problematical," and suggests that Chaubunagungamaug is more likely a compound of elements which in proto-Eastern Algonquian would be *čəp- "divided" + *-ənak- "island" + *-ākamē- "lake" + *-k "that which is," hence, "lake divided by islands," a suitable name for a body of water split by small islands and narrow peninsulas. (See the review of a reissued version of Trumbull's book by Goddard in International Journal of American Linguistics, vol. 43, no. 2 [April, 1977], pp. 157-59.)