D is for Devilish Place Names (Shallow Thoughts)

D is for Devilish Place Names

It was surprisingly hard to come up with a "D" to write about, without descending into Data geekery (always a temptation). Though you may decide I've done that anyway with today's topic.

Out for a scenic drive to shake off some of the house-bound cobwebs, I got to thinking about how so many places are named after the Devil. California was full of them -- the Devil's Punchbowl, the Devil's Postpile, and so forth -- and nearly every western National Park has at least one devilish feature.

How many are there really? Happily, there's an easy way to answer questions like this: the Geographic Names page on the USGS website, which hosts the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS). You can download entire place name files for a state, or you can search for place name matches at: GNIS Feature Search.

When I searched there for "devil", I got 1883 hits -- but many of them don't actually include the word "Devil". What, are they taking lessons from Google about searching for things that don't actually match the search terms?

I decided I wanted to download the results so I could count them more easily. The page offers View & Print all or Save as pipe "|" delimited file. I chose to save the file.

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