Places With the Shortest Names

Have you ever heard of a riv­er called “D” or a vil­lage called “A”? There are a small num­ber of places in the world whose names con­sist of only one let­ter. Despite the fact that these names look out­landish to us, for each of them there is a cor­re­spond­ing mean­ing in the local lan­guage.

1. Let’s start with the vil­lage “A” in Nor­way, the road sign with the name of which appears in many pho­tographs. This is a vil­lage in the munic­i­pal­i­ty of Moskenes in Lofoten, Nor­way. The tra­di­tion­al fish­ing vil­lage has many tra­di­tions of its own, but the local dried fish is the most famous. Recent­ly, tourists have begun to arrive in “A”, vis­it­ing the local muse­um of dried fish and the Nor­we­gian Vil­lage Muse­um

This place is also called “A in Lofoten” as there are sev­en oth­er vil­lages with the same name in Nor­way. Every­thing is actu­al­ly very sim­ple, in Nor­we­gian “A” means “riv­er“

2. Riv­er “D” in the USA
The D Riv­er is locat­ed in Lin­coln City, Ore­gon. Once it was includ­ed in the Guin­ness Book of Records as the short­est riv­er in the world with a length of only 130 meters, but in 1989 it lost this sta­tus. The cham­pi­onship in this nom­i­na­tion was cap­tured by the Roe Riv­er in Mon­tana

Riv­er D flows out of the silt of Dev­il’s Lake and flows into the Pacif­ic Ocean with­out leav­ing Lin­coln.

3. Hills “O”, Den­mark
This piece of land is locat­ed in the east­ern part of Jut­land in Den­mark. The name “O” means “island” in Dan­ish, which is sur­pris­ing since the hills are locat­ed away from any bod­ies of water

4. Riv­er “E” in the UK
Riv­er E is locat­ed in the high­lands of Scot­land, south­east of Loch Ness. The riv­er car­ries its waters in a north­west­er­ly direc­tion for a dis­tance of 10 kilo­me­ters before merg­ing with Lake Mhor. Riv­er “E” has the short­est name not only in Scot­land, but in the whole of the UK

5. Vil­lage “A” in Swe­den
A (pro­nounced “Ay” in Swedish) is a small vil­lage in the munic­i­pal­i­ty of Nor­rkop­ing with a pop­u­la­tion of about 200 peo­ple. As in Nor­way, there are about 12 places with the same name, most of which are very small and con­sist of only a few house­holds. The name is also trans­lat­ed — “riv­er”. As a result, many tourists come here sole­ly to take pic­tures against the back­drop of a sign with the name of the vil­lage.

6. Vil­lage “Y” in France
Vil­lage “Y” (pro­nounced “AY”) is locat­ed in the north of France and has the short­est name in France and one of the short­est in the world. The set­tle­ment is locat­ed 50 kilo­me­ters east of Amiens, not at the inter­sec­tion of high­ways D15 and D615

In addi­tion to the short­est ones, there are also just unusu­al names. For exam­ple, here they wrote about the city of Earth, this is the only set­tle­ment in the world with a sim­i­lar name