Colorado Place Names

by William O. Bright

With listings from Abarr to Zirkel, Colorado Place Names is an indispensable guide to the Centennial State. This lively and useful dictionary of Colorado's place names, filled with fascinating legends and lore, people and events, lists nearly 2,000 Colorado communities, counties, peaks, passes, rivers, streams, and other geographical features. Each alphabetical entry includes, as appropriate, a pronunciation guide, elevation, location, date of founding, history, and origin of name. This new edition is updated to include new counties and towns (Centennial became a real city in 2001 after existing only as a fictional community in James Michener's 1974 novel of the same name), and new research such as some new translations from the Arapahoe language.

The book is filled with facts, both useful and entertaining.
In it you'll find:
• Colorado has places named Conundrum (Pitkin County), Paradox (Montrose County), and Quandary (Summit County)
• The name of the Never Summer Mountains, in Rocky Mountain National Park, is a direct translation of the Arapahoe word niiciibiicei'i ("it is never summer").
• Sawach, also spelled Saguache, is from the Ute sagwach "blue-green"; Pagosa is from the Ute for "stinking water".
• Poncha Pass gets its name from New Mexican Spanish ponche "an inferior type of tobacco".
• Picketwire Valley, in Bent and Las Animas counties, is from the French Purgatoire, shortened from Spanish El Rìo de las Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio "The River of the Lost Souls in Purgatory".

WILLIAM BRIGHT is professor emeritus of linguistics and anthropology at UCLA and professor adjoint of Linguistics at the University of Colorado. He is the author of California Place Names and Native American Place Names of the United States. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

194 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1993

About the author

William Oliver Bright was an American linguist and toponymist who specialized in Native American and South Asian languages and descriptive linguistics.

Bright earned a bachelor's degree in linguistics in 1949 and a doctorate in the same field in 1955, both from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a professor of linguistics and anthropology at UCLA from 1959 to 1988. He then moved to the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he remained on the faculty until his death.