Small Iowa Town Named One Of America’s Most Difficult To Pronounce

Some towns just have to get fancy with their town names.

For a lot of states in America, there are weird town names. Maybe they're ones that are hard to pronounce because they came from a different language or a Native American term. Maybe they're just super random (looking at you What Cheer).

Iowa isn't alone in the tongue-tied town names, Illinois has them too.

Reader's Digest came up with a list of the most difficult towns to pronounce in America and there's an Iowa town on it. It's not a big town at all but the name of it kinda looks like alphabet vomit. But there's no standard pronunciation of the word, so what are we to do?

Iowa's Most Difficult Town To Pronounce

The town name may be hard to say but it has a piece of history dating back 13,000 years. It got its start in 1884 when the railroad was built through the town.

It's Ocheyedan. The normal pronunciation that's accepted is Oh-chee-dan.

The town has a population of under 500, as of the 2022 Census, and it's home to the Ocheyedan Mound, which was carved out by the Wisconsin Glacier 13,000 years ago. Standing at 1,655 feet, it's only 15 feet shorter than Iowa's tallest point, which is Hawkeye Point.

Ocheyedan is home to the Tracy House Museum, the Ocheyedan Pits Recreation Area, and the Willow Creek Wildlife Management Area.

As for the town's unique name, Osceola County Geneology says this about the town's origin:

Just where Ocheyedan gets its name is really not known. In the early Dacotah (Sioux) dictionary compiled in 1852 were two names, Acheya and Akicheya, meaning to mourn as for a dead relative. The Indians of the area applied these to landmarks in the area to commemorate two Indian boys who were killed here by a party of tribal enemies. Acheya (white settlers pronounced it Ocheyedan) is a mourning ground. Ocheyeda was the name applied to Nobles county's (Minnesota) largest lake. An "n" was added and the town in Osceola county was named "Ocheyedan".

So maybe it got it's complicated name because we all said it wrong from the beginning?