States
- Arizona (either from árida zona, meaning arid zone, or from a Spanish word of Basque origin meaning the good oak)
- California (from the name of a fictional island country in "Las sergas de Esplandián", a popular Spanish chivalric romance by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo)
- Colorado (meaning "red " or "ruddy". Named after the Colorado River, whose waters were of that color.)
- Florida (Meaning "flowery" or "florid", because it was discovered by Ponce de León on Easter Sunday, called Pascua Florida to distinguish this holiday, which occurs in springtime when flowers are abundant, from other Christian holidays called Pascua in Spanish, such as Christmas and Epiphany.
- Montana (from montaña, meaning "mountain")
- Nevada (meaning "snowy", from Sierra Nevada, meaning "snow capped range of mountains". Sierra means "a range of mountains,", literally "a saw," from Latin serra.
- New Mexico (Calqued from Nuevo México)
- Texas (based on the Caddo word teshas meaning "friends" or "allies", which was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves and to the region of their settlement in East Texas). The letter x had a "sh" sound in 16th century Spanish which gradually evolved to an "h" sound, which under later spelling reforms was assigned to the letter j (which originally also had a "zh", "j" or "y" sound). Thus the modern Spanish spelling Tejas, which sounds like "Tehas".
- Utah (Spanish word of Nahuatl origin, first used by friar Gerónimo Salmerón as Yuta or Uta in Spanish)
Read more about this topic: List Of U.S. Place Names Of Spanish Origin
Famous quotes containing the word states:
“The line that I am urging as today’s conventional wisdom is not a denial of consciousness. It is often called, with more reason, a repudiation of mind. It is indeed a repudiation of mind as a second substance, over and above body. It can be described less harshly as an identification of mind with some of the faculties, states, and activities of the body. Mental states and events are a special subclass of the states and events of the human or animal body.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“I would rather be known as an advocate of equal suffrage than to speak every night on the best-paying platforms in the United States and ignore it.”
—Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919)
“If I be false, or swerve a hair from truth,
When time is old and hath forgot itself,
When waterdrops have worn the stones of Troy,
And blind oblivion swallowed cities up,
And mighty states characterless are grated
To dusty nothing, yet let memory
From false to false among false maids in love
Upbraid my falsehood.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)