Where names come from

An origin, for us, is a published statement about why a hotel or resort carries the word it carries. A family surname, a headland, a fell, a bird, a village, a count of hours, a joined pair of small words. If the statement exists we follow it; if it does not exist we say that plainly and leave the space empty.

There are no headings over the paragraphs of an entry, because the first words do that work instead. It starts with tells you where the name came from. The word itself tells you what the word is made of. On the ground it is tells you how the name is used by the people who live near it. Worth knowing before you write to them is the practical line.

We do not derive etymologies ourselves. We are editors, not linguists, and a plausible-sounding derivation invented at a desk is worse than an admission of ignorance. When a source is silent we write that the published record goes no further, and we would rather publish that sentence than a guess dressed up as a fact.

Names connected with Indigenous peoples are written strictly from published material, with no generalisation about a community and no translation supplied by us. Where a source states a connection between a place, a name and a First Nation, we repeat that connection in our own words and stop there.

The line reading Source opened is the month in which we last opened the material behind an entry. It is not the date a hotel was built, renamed or refurbished, and it is not a promise that nothing has changed since. It is a record of our own reading.

Material comes from hotel and operator sites, local history and language publications, and the press. We read in the language of the place where we can. Nothing here is supplied by a hotel in exchange for anything, and no entry has been bought.

We do not publish prices, star classifications, ratings, room counts or availability, and we take no bookings. There are no affiliate links on this site and no paid placements. A hotel may write to us with a correction and we will read it; a hotel may not pay for one.

There is a Casino Hotels chapter because four Canadian resorts happen to carry unusually clean place names, and place names are the subject here. The gaming floor is not described, rated or recommended anywhere on this site. If a name in that chapter is interesting it is interesting as a name.