You Should See the Size of the Hats in the Lake Gift Shop
Chargoggagoggmanchauggauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg. It may look like the result of someone falling asleep on their keyboard, but it's actually the name of a lake near the town of Webster in central Massachusetts, and it's got a local chamber of commerce scrambling to fix not-so-glaring spelling errors on highway signs.
The Worcester Telegram & Gazette reports that the signs are mistakenly spelled "with an 'o' where a 'u' should be, at letter 20, and an 'h' instead of an 'n' at letter 38." So, the correction will actually lower the lake's Scrabble word value from 134 points to 131.
The U.S. Board on Geographic Names says that the lake's name is a Nipmuck Indian word that translates loosely to "You fish on your side, I fish on my side, nobody fishes in the middle," and not "One who wandered from the Spell-Check spirit world."
A number of Webster-area residents actually noticed the misspelling, the Telegram & Gazette reports. There's no estimate on the number of locals who set out for a lovely afternoon at Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg, but saw only the signs for Lake Chargoggagoggmanchaoggauggagoggchaubunaguhgamaugg and decided to just go home.
- Worcester Telegram & Gazette: Misspelling on Lake Signs to Get Overdue Correction
- U.S. Board on Geographic Names Feature Detail Report for Lake (geonames.USGS.gov)
