How Did the Great Lakes Get Their Names?

The Great Lakes, situated on or near the border between the United States and Canada, are among the defining geological features of North America. The chain of five freshwater lakes formed as massive glaciers from the last Ice Age melted.

A central part of the lives of the region’s Indigenous peoples for thousands of years, the Great Lakes have been known to the rest of the world by a variety of names for a far briefer period.

The first known Europeans to witness the stunning expanse of the Great Lakes were the French explorers and missionaries who pushed further inland from the Atlantic coast along the St. Lawrence River in the early 17th century.

French interpreter Étienne Brûlé, who arrived in Quebec in 1608 before living among the region’s Indigenous peoples, is believed to have visited four of the five Great Lakes; he never saw what we now call Lake Michigan. However, Samuel de Champlain, a French explorer and cartographer who employed Brûlé and helped establish New France, was the first to record personal observations of what became lakes Huron and Ontario in his 1619 book Voyages et Descouvertures faites en la Nouvelle France.

The earliest written record of Lake Superior dates to a 1641 account from Récollet priests Isaac Jogues and Charles Raymbault. Meanwhile, local Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) nations largely denied European explorers access to Lake Erie, preventing its firsthand documentation until Louis Jolliet arrived at its shores in 1669.

French interpreter Jean Nicollet is often credited with being the first European to visit Lake Michigan in the 1630s. However, historical records from the following decade indicate he probably journeyed to Lake Superior, instead. By the 1670s, multiple expeditions had documented voyages on Lake Michigan’s waters.

The Great Lakes were originally named by local Indigenous peoples. These names, or the names of the Indigenous nations themselves, often influenced what French explorers dubbed the bodies of water. In other cases, early names for the lakes were French in origin.

Lake Ontario: As far back as 1641, French missionaries were using the name Lake Ontario, derived from the Wendat word Ontarí:io to signify “great lake” or “beautiful lake.” Champlain coined the waters Lac St. Louis, and over the course of the 17th century, it was variously known as: Lac des Iroquois; Lac Frontenac, after Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac, governor general of New France; and Skanadario, a Haudenosaunee term with a meaning similar to Ontarí:io.

Lake Erie: The smallest of the Great Lakes by volume, Erie took its name from an Indigenous nation known as the Eriehronon (or a similar variation), whose members lived along the southern shore. A Récollet friar translated the name into English as “Cat People,” allegedly for the wildcats that populated the territory. This led to the lake’s alternate name, Lac du Chat, according to a 1955 journal article by Ivan Walton, a late University of Michigan professor and Great Lakes scholar.

Lake Huron: Champlain initially called Lake Huron “La Mer Douce,” meaning the “freshwater sea,” wrote Walton. Another early moniker was Lac d’Orleans, though missionaries named the waters after the Wendat, an Indigenous nation whose people the French referred to as the Hurons. A seminal 1656 map created by French cartographer Nicolas Sanson records the lake as Karegnondi, said to be a Wendat name that translates to “freshwater sea.”

Lake Michigan: Known simply as Grand Lac to Champlain, Lake Michigan picked up the less-flattering label of Lac des Puans for the local “stinkards”—the Ho-Chunk (Winnebago)—who resided in a foul-smelling area on Green Bay in present-day Wisconsin. The lake later became known as Lac des Illinois, after another Indigenous group that dwelled in the region, as well as Lac St. Joseph and Lac Dauphin. The current name, said to be derived from the Ojibwe term for “great water,” michi-gama, began taking shape after appearing on maps as Missihiganin and Michigane in the 1670s.

Lake Superior: The Ojibwe people traditionally referred to Lake Superior as gitchi-gami, which loosely translates to “big sea.” Although the English name that endures today appropriately describes the largest of the Great Lakes, the French supérieur was originally a directional term indicating Superior’s position upstream from the other lakes. It was also briefly known as Lac Tracy, Walton wrote, following the military victory of Alexandre de Prouville, marquis de Tracy over the Haudenosaunee in 1666.

Underscoring the confusion over the proper terminology for the Great Lakes, Venetian cartographer Vincenzo Coronelli pulled many of the popular names together for a 1688 map, labeling Lake Ontario as “Lac Frontenac, ou Ontario, et Skaniadorio, ou S. Louis.”

The modern names of lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario became established during the 18th century, even as some of the older names continued to linger. A 1703 map by French cartographer Guillaume Delisle labels Lake Michigan as “Lac des Ilinois,” while a 1733 map by English cartographer Henry Popple identifies Lake Ontario as “Lake Ontario or Frontenac.” However, a 1744 map by Jacques Nicolas Bellin, one of the most important cartographers of his era, lists the five names that, while in French, are instantly recognizable to viewers today.

In August 2026, President Donald Trump signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America for U.S. government purposes.