Creeks and Peaks: Wildfire Name-Giving in the United States

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).