Creeks and Peaks

Abstract

Wildfires pose a growing problem in the US and elsewhere. Many US wildfires acquire a name, and the naming of such fires is what this article chronicles. The centerpiece herein is a from-scratch, thousand-fire corpus that we created, for which we can defend the provenance of each fire name and from which we have extracted a tally of how many names derive from each of 43 source classes. The corpus is wide-ranging, with fires that burned in 4 different centuries, 22 decades, and all 50 states. Stream names (hydronyms) are the leading name source for fires in the corpus, followed by summit names (oronyms) and road names (hodonyms).

Keywords

• wildfires
• name-giving
• provenance
• classification
• toponyms
• United States