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Comment by IAmBroom | Hacker News Reader

Where the Missouri and Mississippi meet, they each contribute roughly 50% of the water. The Mississippi was better known, so the Missouri became the "tributary" in name.

If the opposite decision had been made, the river would be even longer in the books.

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Interesting. I thought it was because the river emptied into the Gulf closest to the state of Mississippi. Like, it would have been slightly unintuitive to have named it the Missouri River all the way down past those Gulf Coast states. The history of river names and deciding which name continues after a confluence is quite interesting.

It is an Algonquian name for the river, which the French transliterated when they explored the upper reaches.

The whole thing is called the Mississippi river because it was the first to be discovered and named, and the French name stuck (I forgot what the Spanish called it but that name didn’t stick)

A quick trip to Wikipedia says that the Spanish name was Río del Espíritu Santo, River of the Holy Spirit, and the initial French name was fleuve de l'Immaculée Conception, River of the Immaculate Conception, and later the fleuve Colbert or the rivière Saint-Louis.

> The word Mississippi itself comes from Messipi, the French rendering of the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe or Algonquian) name for the river, Misi-ziibi (Great River). [1]

I guess technically it’s the Anglicized French transliteration of the Algonquian name that stuck. Why that happened has more to do with the French-Indian war.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_River#History

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Why is a crooked letter.

Miyyiyyinni?

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