“There’s been discussion over the years about prohibiting others, but our board takes a very conservative approach to making any changes,” said Lou Yost, the board’s executive secretary for domestic names. “People disagree on what’s acceptable, and views change over time.”

A case in point is Negro, once a commonly accepted term that fell out of favor in the 1960s, though some government agencies used it until recently. It remains in hundreds of place names around the country, including many that were changed from the n-word that was banished.

There are occasional efforts to change one or more Negro names. Yet after South Dakota required removing the word from names there, some black leaders argued for keeping it, and lawmakers rescinded the mandate last year.

Efforts to remove “squaw” can draw bewildered reactions from white people, who say they had no idea that Indians objected to it. Some Native Americans do not take offense at the word, but many do, and some consider it so ugly they call it “the s-word.”

English speakers have used the term for almost 400 years, starting in what is now the Northeastern United States. Linguists say it probably derives from terms for woman in Algonquian languages, but Indians often contend that it comes from a word for vagina. (Sometimes, the vulgarity is beyond debate; there are summits called Squaw Teat or derivations of that.)

Image Boyd Britton, a Grant County commissioner, said some of the proposed changes raised safety concerns. Credit... Blue Mountain Eagle

No other objectionable word appears nearly as many times — about 1,000 — in the federal place name database, and until the past decade, Oregon had the highest concentration, though no one seems to know why.