Niagara Falls Got Its Name From a Neck, Not a Waterfall

Niagara Falls is named for its river, and the river’s name, as early writers explained it, had nothing to do with falling water: it meant a neck. The neck was the short river itself, joining Lake Erie to Lake Ontario “as the body and head are united,” in the words of a 1907 New York State Museum study.

The neck between two lakes

That study was William M. Beauchamp’s Aboriginal Place Names of New York, and he was blunt about it. Niagara “meant simply the neck connecting two great lakes.” Henry Gannett’s 1905 place-names bulletin for the U.S. Geological Survey agrees in fewer words: an Iroquois word meaning “across the neck,” or “at the neck.”

Beauchamp didn’t hide the loose ends, though. Early writers often dropped the first letter, he says, and wrote the word as Yagerah or Jagara. That form “might lead to a different interpretation,” because David Zeisberger, who compiled an early dictionary of German, English, Onondaga and Delaware words, defined the Onondaga word Joragaree as “to roar.” For a river with a waterfall in it, you can see the appeal. Beauchamp mentions it and still sticks with the neck.

The Neutral people’s river

The name turns up in French records first. In 1640, Beauchamp writes, the Neutral nation, a people living between the Hurons and the Iroquois, had a village at the mouth of the “River d’Onguiaahra.” A Jesuit report of 1641 says the river “takes the name of Onguiaahra” where it enters Neutral country. “Primarily the name belonged to the Neutral nation,” Beauchamp concludes.

From there the spelling went everywhere. Oneigra and Oniagorah in 1687, Oakinagaro in 1701, Onjagera and Ochjagara in 1720, and Oniagara in English use by 1726. Dr. E. B. O’Callaghan counted 39 ways of spelling the word, “and there may be more,” Beauchamp adds.

Say it like a poet

The stress in Niagara used to fall on a different syllable. Beauchamp points out that “for a long time the accent was placed on the penult,” the next-to-last syllable, and he quotes a couplet from Goldsmith’s poem The Traveller to prove it:

When wild Oswego spreads her swamps around, And Niagara stuns with thund’ring sound.

Read it out loud and you can hear the old stress near the end of the word.

The English form itself came from one dialect in particular. Lewis H. Morgan collected the word from several Iroquois nations, Beauchamp says, and wrote the Mohawk version as O-ne-a-ga’-ra, “whose pronunciation the English naturally followed,” though Marshall heard the Mohawk word a little differently.

What the falls themselves were called

The falls had names of their own, too, and Beauchamp lists several Indian names for them. Ga-sko-sa-da simply means “falls (of a river).” Morgan recorded Date-car’-sko-sase, “highest falls,” and Orsamus H. Marshall had Det-gah’-skoh-ses, “place of the high fall,” though Beauchamp says “neither of these is exact.” That’s the same Marshall who, in his 1865 Niagara Frontier, said there was nothing left to add about where Buffalo got its name, up on Lake Erie. The one Beauchamp singled out was Kas-sko-so-wah-nah, “great falls”: “Of all the Indian names given to the falls this alone expresses greatness.”

None of those won. The national gazetteer, the Geographic Names Information System, lists Niagara Falls as the official name and keeps the others as variants, along with the French Chute de Niagara from an 1806 map and the “Falls of Oniagara,” which Beauchamp quotes from a deed of 1726. The city next to the falls took its name straight from them, Gannett says. So the falls are named, in the end, after the piece of river they interrupt.

Historical Sources & References

• William M. Beauchamp, Aboriginal Place Names of New York (New York State Museum Bulletin 108, 1907). Niagara County, pp. 131–135: the Indian names for the falls (Ga-sko-sa-da, Kas-sko-so-wah-nah) and Morgan’s and Marshall’s versions; the 1726 deed with “the Falls of Oniagara”; the name as “the neck connecting two great lakes”; Zeisberger’s “to roar” and his Onondaga dictionary (p. 15); the early spellings from 1687 to 1726; the Neutral village of 1640 and the Jesuit Relation of 1641; O’Callaghan’s 39 spellings; the old accent and Goldsmith’s couplet; Morgan’s Mohawk O-ne-a-ga’-ra, “whose pronunciation the English naturally followed.” Erie County, p. 59: Marshall’s list in the appendix to The Niagara Frontier (1865).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905). Entry “Niagara”: “An Iroquois Indian word meaning ‘across the neck,’ or ‘at the neck.’” Entry “Niagara Falls”: the city is “named from the celebrated falls on the Niagara River.”
• Orsamus H. Marshall, The Niagara Frontier (Buffalo, 1865). p. 39: on Buffalo, “no additional light can be thrown upon the subject.” The same paper gives the Mohawk, Seneca and Neutral forms of Niagara (pp. 12–13) and the Seneca names for the falls (p. 19 and the appendix).
• GNIS feature 958544, Niagara Falls (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record: the official name, and variants including Chute de Niagara (1806 map), and Falls of Oniagara and the Indian names for the falls, credited to Beauchamp’s 1907 bulletin.