Talk:Swampscott, Massachusetts

Postcard of "The Boulevard in 1910" not accurate
This postcard is in fact a picture of Lynn. Today, this stretch of shorefront is called Lynn Shore Drive. This scene depicts the beach-front side of what is called the "Diamond District" of Lynn - where many of Lynn's financial elite lived - nearby to thier downtown factories.

The town boarder with Swampscott is about 1 mile in the distance from the point of reference in this picture - completely out of view. Real postcard or not, this is not a picture of Swampscott and should be removed from this article.

I am a resident of Swampscott and I live along this shared shoreline. --Mespinola (talk) 19:16, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

Etymology
What is the etymology of the name "Swampscott"? It doesn't seem to be explained from which language this word comes. Badagnani (talk) 17:59, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Naming Section
After doing some research, I found a book uploaded onto Google Books, all about Swampscott. You can find it here, and by navigating to page 7, you will find this passage:

The name Swampscott is of Indian origin...it is composed of two Indian words, a substantive, Ompsk, and an appellative, Musqui..Mosqui-Ompsk-ut means literally "at the red rock."

I think this is reliable enough to be added, it's a published book --Zinc 30 (talk) 20:33, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Copyright problem removed
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Pronunciation
The pronunciation as swɑmp skət is completely imcorrect, it should be swɑːmskɑt Macy Sinrich (talk) 03:22, 17 May 2020 (UTC)


 * That's certainly the way I always pronounced it, growing up in Beverly. I think both pronunciations are correct. AJD (talk) 05:35, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
 * FWIW, non-reliable sources on the internet I could found in a cursory search, like, all indicated /ə/. On Forvo, two out of three (including the upvoted one) say /ə/. You may also check the news archive, which I haven't bothered to. The elision of /p/ is confirmed in the first and third sources I mentioned, but that's more or less predictable from the distinct form. In any case, unless one can show a more reliable source than Dictionary.com, the current transcription must stay. (I assume you two mean /ɒ/, not /ɑ/. I have to assume Swampscott is one of the few places in the US where they have that distinction, though the transcription we use for English is diaphonemic so it's /ɒ/ either way.) Nardog (talk) 08:58, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

Etymology again
The site we currently link to for the etymology is down and I dont think it's coming back. The town's official website does not give an etymology,  only saying that the area "was called the land of the red rock". A mere "was called" is not going to help us.

The similar names Presumpscot and Passumpsic, further north, might provide clues as to the etymology of Swampscott .... indeed, the first name might even contain the whole of the word Swampscott within it. But I dont know the etymologies of those names either and I woudlnt trust just any old website I find on the Internet.

That said, the closest thing I could find to an etymology is Boston Central, certainly not a WP:RS although we have linked to it elsewhere to support news stories. Can anyone else help? — Soap — 20:01, 30 October 2020 (UTC)

If the experts are stumped, so are we
Someone outside Wikipedia kindly provided me with information from William Bright's Native American Placenames of the United States. Of the three names Passumpsic, Presumpscot and Swampscott, he provides a definitive etymology for only the first, and for Swampscott all he stated was that it probably contained the word for rock.

A second source I found, much older, didn't know any more about these place names either, which doesn't surprise me ... so my impression is that nobody really knows. And we can perhaps provide claimed etymologies for the name of this town, but picking out any of them as the sole valid etymology would be wrong. — Soap — 22:05, 30 October 2020 (UTC)