Lake Ontario Is Still Lake Ontario

Lake Ontario has been part of my life since childhood, from days at the Scarborough Bluffs to running Danna Bananas in Pickering, just down the road from the lake. I wanted to know where its name came from, and it turns out to be quite a story.

Where Did the Name Lake Ontario Come From?

The name is commonly traced to the Wendat word Ontari'io. Translations vary slightly, but they land in the same place: "beautiful lake," "great lake," or "the lake is beautiful, the lake is big."

The Mohawk word kanadario is also connected to the name, usually translated as "sparkling water" or "beautiful water."

There is also Katarokwi, later written as Cataraqui by the French, tied historically to the lake and the Kingston area.

I came across a lot of this through historian Craig Baird, who has done a lot of digging into the name.

The Lake Has Had a Few Names Before

European explorers and mapmakers recorded several different names for the lake before Ontario became the one used consistently.

Samuel de Champlain called it Lac de St. Louis in 1632. Jesuit historian François du Creux recorded it as Lacus Ontarius in 1660. Another 1660s map used Lac Ontario ou des Iroquois. A 1712 French map went with Lac Frontenac.

The French names came and went. Lacus Ontarius was an early Latin form of Ontario, the name that stayed.

The province of Ontario was not created until 1867, more than 200 years after Lacus Ontarius showed up on a European map. So the province took its name from the lake, not the other way around.

A Few Numbers, Because I Like Numbers

Lake Ontario is the smallest of the five Great Lakes by surface area, at roughly 18,960 square kilometres. Smallest is relative. It still holds more than three times as much water as Lake Erie, because it is much deeper: about 86 metres on average, and 244 metres at its deepest point.

It is also the easternmost Great Lake, the last stop before the water heads into the St. Lawrence River and out to the Atlantic.

Still Here, Still Ontario

When I was a kid, we would spend the day at the Scarborough Bluffs, hanging out on the beach and looking up at those bluffs. Afterwards, we would go to Dairy Queen for a chocolate dipped cone. The Bluffs felt like an oasis in the city, right at the bottom of Brimley Road and only a 16-minute drive from where I grew up... HOME! ❤️

Lake Ontario remained part of my life after I moved from Scarborough to Pickering. I still return to the upper and lower Bluffs for walks and hikes, but I will leave climbing them to my childhood memories. (WINK!)

Danna Bananas has been based in Pickering, near the Lake Ontario shoreline, since 2006. I have watched the lake change with every season for two decades, and the name has never once been the confusing part.

The name, with its Indigenous roots, has outlasted four centuries of mapmakers, colonizers and border changes.

Some names just do not need fixing.

And there is still plenty of summer left, so get out there and have some fun on Lake Ontario. Whatever floats your boat. (WINK!)

Sources: Craig Baird, Canadian History Ehx, on Lake Ontario’s name history; Museum of Indigenous People, “What Is in a Name? Ontario”; and NOAA, “The Formation of the Great Lakes”.