Distinctive Florida Place Names Quiz

Answer: Sopchoppy

Standard Operating Procedure is often abbreviated SOP. Mincing and dicing are choppy activities, so...Sopchoppy. Really, now, throwing things is unnecessary. In reality, the town draws its name from the river it sits beside, whose name is from a Native American language (which one is in some dispute), and means simply "river".

Answer: Kissimmee

"KISS-a-me" is a request for a smooch. "kih-SIM-ee" is the home of the Silver Spurs Rodeo, and a slightly less expensive place to stay when visiting the Orlando area theme parks, and it is about equidistant. Modern Kissimmee bears little resemblance to the sleepy rural town we visited in my youth to see the Silver Spurs.

Answer: Spuds

Spuds is hanging on, but like many tiny agricultural communities, it is having a rough go. The American automobile culture means that people do not need to live just next to their crops. Some of Spuds' farmers live in nearby Hastings, others more than 20 miles away in St. Augustine. I will hate to see the town go, if it does. It is a reminder of a simpler time.

Answer: Wilbur-By-The-Sea

Wilbur is the surname of the Massachusetts developer who bought the property in the early 1920s. In addition to its whimsical sounding name, Wilbur-By-The-Sea is one of a very few places left on Florida's Atlantic coast that does not have a wall of highrise condominiums trying to block the sea breeze.

In fact, there are no highrises of any kind. The town has the ambience of a Florida beach town from the sixties. How can you not love a town called Wilbur, where the hot dining spot is (and has been for four decades) "The Boondocks"?

Answer: Howey-in-the-Hills

Citrus speculator William Howey created the town out of nothing in the early 1920s. The first residents lived in a tent city until housing was built. Incorporated as Howey in 1925, in 1927 the name became Howey-in-the-Hills after the pleasant terrain that Mr. Howey called "the Florida Alps". Howey-in-the-Hills has deliberately kept a small town atmosphere despite being located in the crush of the bustling Orlando-Kissimmee metropolitan area.

It is worth a stop.

Answer: Boca Raton

No, Florida does not have giant rats...unless you count nutria. In Spanish, an opening from the ocean to more sheltered waters (what we Anglophones call an inlet) is called a "mouth" or "boca". Boca Raton Inlet is known for its rocky bottom, which tended to destroy the hand woven anchor ropes of the 16th and 17th Centuries.

The Spanish thought that their mooring lines looked like they had been chewed by big rats (raton in Spanish)(the term "Rodents of Unusual Size not yet being current), so the inlet, and the city that grew next to it, became Boca Raton.

Answer: Miami

We know that Julia Tuttle recommended the name Miami for the new settlement while persuading Henry Flager to run his Florida East Coast Railway that far south. It gets a bit murky from there. The two most popular theories on the origin of the name are attached to similar sounding words from two Native American groups, that had different meanings, either "big water" from the Calusa or "sweet water" from the Seminole. Pronunciation is a mess as well. Floridians older than me still tend to pronounce Miami as "my-AM-uh", my generation of Anglophones tend to pronounce it "my-AM-ee" and the 40 percent or so of the city's population who had Spanish as their first language tend to say it "me-AH-me".

It's the place of my birth, so no matter how you say it--I hear "home".

Answer: Tallahassee

Some of the place names in northwestern Florida, where the Apalachee and Choctaw peoples used to flourish, are as difficult to pronounce as they are to spell. Happily, "TAL-uh-HASS-ee" is easy enough to say, if devilishly hard for grade school children to spell.

Answer: Apalachicola

Apalachicola is, not surprisingly, a word from the Apalachee people. It refers to the low ring of earth built up when ground was swept in preparation for laying a peace or council fire. The Apalachee may have also drawn their name from the practice. By the way, I was not teasing about the oysters.

It is a little problematic these days, but when there is enough flow from the Apalachicola River to help Apalachicola Bay turn over its water, the slightly smaller than average Apalachicola oysters were phenomenal. I used to put away the sweet, succulent "colas" by the quart.

Answer: Okeechobee

Lake Okeechobee ranks only behind Lake Michigan in area for natural freshwater lakes in the conterminous United States, so it definitely counts as "big water". Our friends the Hitchiti, while sadly extinct as a people, left their mark on the map in other places, too. Most notable of these places is the great swamp straddling the Georgia/Florida border.

Its peat stained waters cover enough area to be the largest blackwater swamp in North America, and the methane and carbon dioxide bubbles that periodically reach the surface of those dark waters are what caused the Hitchiti to call the place "bubbling waters" or Okefenokee.