Minnesota: The City of Lino Lakes

[CannedMan]

I am currently writing subtitles for a program for NatGeo which has a section of it dedicated to Minnesota. In the section’s introduction of Minnesota, they present it as ‘the City of Lino Lakes’. Reading up on Wikipedia (since Oxford Dictionaries, our national encyclopaedia, my dictionary and everything else turns up nothing), I learn that the origin of the word ‘lino’ is unknown, so I turn to you guys for help in this. Are there any local historians, linguists or other people who have any idea what the word means?

[RusselB]

While my own searches didn't turn up anything definite, there is a potential that the Lino came from the Liberal party.
This is a bit of a supposition based on the information obtained from the following websites, with the specifics of each site quoted beneath the site.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lino

LINO is also a politics-related acronym for:

Libertarian In Name Only
Liberal In Name Only
Labour In Name Only

https://www.bestplaces.net/voting/city/ ... lino_lakes
That entire page appears to be relevant to my supposition.

[RoryOF]

It is possible that "lino" is a (phonetic or corrupted spelling) of a name in a native language. I have very recently run into such naming in a similar instance in another country.

[CannedMan]

Thanks for these replies. I guess this means I'll just stick to ‘origin of name unknown’ for now, but will be very curious to learn more of this, should anyone discover something. @RoryOF: That very same thing is well-known in Northern Norway, where 19th century governmental representatives tried to figure out what Norwegian words the Sami were using when giving the names for various places. One such area is Hjemmeluft (‘Home-air’, /'jem:e.lʉft), which doesn't make sense at all; the actual Sami name for the place, Jiemmaluovta (/'ji.em:a.lu.ov.ta/), from jiepma = seal cub + luokta = bay or sound, means Sealcub’s Bay.

[Villeroy]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mergentha ... pe_Company

[Bill]

A MOMENT IN HISTORY: The creation of Line O' Lakes

This article from the Anoka County Historical Society tells how the name "Lino Lakes" was selected.

[CannedMan]

Bollocks.

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Thanks a lot anyways!

[Bill]

Basically, when names were being suggested in 1955, one suggestion was "Line O' Lakes" which was simplified to "Lino Lakes".

[CannedMan]

So it literally means ‘a line of lakes’?

[Bill]

That's quite possible. If you look at a map of the area, there are more than a dozen lakes in the area and the Rice Creek Chain of Lakes Park Reserve is in the same county. It's my understanding from the article that the name Line O' Lakes was inspired by the town Land O' Lakes in Wisconsin.