How Ohio Got Its Name: Great River or Beautiful River?

In a book published in 1891, the Ohio historian Henry Howe wrote that the state was lucky its river didn’t have a name like the Onion, a river in Vermont. Ohio takes its name from the Ohio River, and the old books argue about what the river’s name means.

“Say the name of a certain river now in Vermont”

Howe’s point was that a good name helps a place grow. “Suppose an unsavory name had been given to the great river, and then applied to the State,” he wrote. “It might have retarded its settlement for years.” Then came the Onion. “Who would have sung its praises?” He’d just quoted an old song from back east about going to “settle on the banks of the pleasant Ohio,” and you can see why he thought the Onion wouldn’t have worked in that line.

He also liked that the name was short. By his count, Ohio “makes three letters do the business,” since the last letter is only the first one again.

Beautiful, or great

One answer is the one Henry Gannett gave in his 1905 list of place names for the U.S. Geological Survey: “An Iroquois Indian word meaning ‘beautiful river.’” The French, too, called the river la belle rivière.

The 1850 printing of Howe’s first edition, copyrighted in 1847, has a short section titled “Signification and Origin of the Name Ohio,” credited to Colonel John Johnston, who, Howe says elsewhere, had been an Indian agent appointed by Jefferson. Johnston wrote that the Shawnees called the river “Kis,ke,pi,la Sepe,” or Eagle River. He thought the Wyandots had been there longer, so their name should come first: “O,he,zuh.” Ohio, he said, was “no doubt adopted by the early French voyagers in their boat songs,” and their “fair and beautiful” meant the same thing the Indians meant, “great, grand and fair to look upon.”

William Elsey Connelley, writing in a 1922 history of Kentucky, wasn’t having any of it. The word Ohio “means great,” he wrote, “not beautiful.” It’s Iroquoian, he says, spoken as “O-he’-zhu” in Wyandot and Seneca and “O-he’-yo” in Mohawk and Cayuga. The French did call it “La Belle Riviere,” but, in his words, “they got no such name from the Indians.” He says the Iroquois called it the Great River all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, and he spells it out: “The State of Ohio got its name from the Ohio River.”

The state with no starting date

If you ask when Ohio became a state, you’ll find the name was settled long before the date was. Congress passed an enabling act on April 30, 1802, and the first state legislature met on March 1, 1803. But as Rufus King wrote in his 1888 history, “there was no formal act of admission by Congress,” so people argued about when Ohio actually became a state. King says Congress settled it in 1806, sideways, with a law about back pay. It paid the old territorial officers through March 1, 1803, which, he says, “may be deemed an authoritative decision of the subject.” So Ohio got its name from a river whose name the books can’t agree on, and its start date from a payroll.

Sources & further reading

• Henry Howe, Historical Collections of Ohio (1847; 1850 printing), p. 574. “Signification and Origin of the Name Ohio,” credited in a footnote to Col. John Johnston: “Kis,ke,pi,la Sepe,” Eagle River; the Wyandot “O,he,zuh”; the French boat songs; “la belle rivere”; “great, grand and fair to look upon.”
• Henry Howe, Historical Collections of Ohio, Ohio Centennial Edition, vol. 1 (1891). Col. John Johnston, “agent among the Indians, appointed by Jefferson” (pp. 295, 297); the benefit of a good name; “three letters”; the song with “the pleasant Ohio”; “Suppose an unsavory name had been given to the great river, and then applied to the State”; “Onion” (p. 297).
• William Elsey Connelley and E. M. Coulter, History of Kentucky, vol. 1 (1922), p. 2. “The word Ohio means great”; “not beautiful”; the Wyandot, Mohawk, Cayuga, and Seneca forms; “La Belle Riviere”; “they got no such name from the Indians”; “The State of Ohio got its name from the Ohio River.”
• Rufus King, Ohio: First Fruits of the Ordinance of 1787 (1888), pp. 293–295. The people “had given it the name of the State of Ohio” (p. 293); the enabling act of April 30, 1802; “no formal act of admission by Congress”; the legislature of March 1, 1803; the act of February 21, 1806, paying territorial officers until March 1, 1803; “an authoritative decision of the subject.”
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 229. “Ohio; State of the Union, river, and counties in Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia. An Iroquois Indian word meaning ‘beautiful river.’”
• U.S. Census Bureau, state codes (2020). Lists Ohio’s permanent federal place-name record number (GNIS 1085497).