How Pennsylvania Got Its Name (William Penn Tried to Stop It)

Pennsylvania is named for the father of William Penn, not for Penn himself, and Penn didn’t want the name at all: he asked for “New Wales,” then plain “Sylvania,” and lost both times. We know this because he said so, in a letter he wrote the day after the king signed off on his colony.

A colony instead of a payday

The story starts with money. The English government owed Penn’s late father, Admiral Sir William Penn, a big debt for money and services, about £16,000 with interest, according to the historian Samuel Hazard. In 1680, the younger Penn offered to take land in America instead and petitioned King Charles II for it.

The charter came through on March 4, 1681. In it, the king says he’s granting the land partly out of “regard to the memory and merits” of Penn’s father, and singles out the admiral’s role in a 1665 naval battle against the Dutch. Then comes the line that settled the name: “we do call it Pensilvania, and so from henceforth will have it called.”

The name Penn didn’t want

The next day, Penn wrote to his friend Robert Turner. Hazard prints the letter in full, and it’s the best source there is on the name:

“this day my country was confirmed to me under the great seal of England, with large powers and privileges, by the name of Pennsylvania, a name the king would give it, in honour of my father.”

Penn’s own pick had been different. “I chose New Wales,” he wrote, “being, as this, a pretty hilly country.” But the king’s secretary, who was Welsh himself, refused to have it called New Wales. So Penn tried again with “Sylvania,” meaning woodland. Then, as he put it, “they added Penn to it.”

He fought it. He went to the king to have it “struck out and altered,” and the king told him it was done and he’d take responsibility for it himself. Penn even says “twenty guineas” wouldn’t get the under-secretaries to change it. His worry was how it would look: he “feared lest it should be looked on as a vanity in me, and not as a respect in the king, as it truly was, to my father.”

What the word means

Penn gave his own reading of the finished name. Penn, he wrote, is Welsh for “head,” as in places like Penrith, so he took Pennsylvania to mean “the high or head woodlands.” The sylvania part comes from silva, Latin for “forest,” as the U.S. Geological Survey’s 1905 place-name book explains.

That same 1905 book says the state is named for William Penn, “to whom the land… was granted.” It’s an easy mistake to make. But Penn’s letter says the king picked the name in honor of the father, and the charter itself praises the admiral by name. The son did his best to keep his family name off the map.

Sources & further reading

• Samuel Hazard, ed., Annals of Pennsylvania (1850). Explains the debt owed to Admiral Penn, about £16,000 (p. 474), and prints the charter of March 4, 1681, with its reference to the admiral and the line “we do call it Pensilvania” (pp. 488–490). Also prints Penn’s letter to Robert Turner, “5th of 1st mo. 1681,” with the whole story of New Wales, Sylvania and the twenty guineas (p. 500).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 241. Gives sylvania from the Latin silva, “forest.” Credits the name to William Penn himself, which Penn’s own letter contradicts.
• U.S. Census Bureau, state codes (2020). Lists Pennsylvania’s permanent federal place-name record number (GNIS 1779798).