By Ginny
Oklahoma’s capital is Oklahoma City.
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Oklahoma is a word that was made up by the native American missionary Allen Wright. He combined two Choctaw words, “ukla” meaning person and “humá” meaning red to form the word that first appears in a 1866 Choctaw treaty. Oklahoma means “red person.”
Texas’s capital is Austin.
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Texas comes from the word “teysha” meaning “hello friend” in the language of the Caddo Indian tribes. Spanish explorers and settlers used this word to refer to the friendly tribes throughout Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas.

Arizona’s capital is Phoenix
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It’s said that a mining speculator named Charles D. Poston first suggested the name Arizona in a petition to the United States Congress to make Arizona a legal territory.
The name, Arizona, is derived from a combination of two words from the Papago Indian dialect of the Pima language; “Aleh” and “Zon” together as “Aleh-zon” meaning “little spring.” The “little spring”, located in Mexican territory, is near a large silver discovery made in Arizona Creek.
Other names suggested in 1854, when the inhabitants of the area petitioned the U.S. Congress for territorial recognition, were Pimeria and Gadsonia. According to Thomas Edwin Farish’s History of Arizona printed in 1915, Arizona was selected because it sounded the best.
Pimeria was in reference to the land of the Pima Indians of the region.
Gadsonia was a Latin adaptation of the surname of James Gadsden. This suggested name is rooted in one man’s dream/scheme to establish a southern transcontinental railroad running from Florida to the Pacific coast. Underlying this idea was Mr. Gadsden’s desire to make the western territories economically dependent on the southern states rather than the northern states. James Gadsden was appointed U.S. Minister to Mexico and instructed to purchase, from Mexico, a strip of land south of the Gila River and lying in what is now southwestern New Mexico and southern Arizona. The Gadsden Purchase formalized the deal, providing Mexico with $10,000,000, the United States with 45,535 square miles of land and a clarified the U.S./Mexico boundary. The Gadsden Purchase also provided James Gadsden with a route for his transcontinental railroad.
New Mexico’s capital is Santa Fe.
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The name of this state is an anglicized version of “Nuevo Mexico,” the Spanish name for the upper Rio Grande. Mexico, an Aztec spelling, means “place of Mexitli” one of the Aztec gods.