10 Texas towns with funny names

When it comes to the names of towns and cities, Texas is pretty iconic. You can do your own European road trip with towns like Paris, Berlin, Florence, and London. And don’t forget about the girl group towns of Melissa, Anna, Odessa, Katy, and Alice. We featured the town of White Settlement in our list of  DFW city names and their origins, so now let’s dig into town names throughout the state that are objectively funny, and maybe even cute. 

Ding Dong

Just a few miles south of Killeen, Ding Dong was founded by couple Bert and Zulis Bell. They hired a painter to make a sign for their convenience store and he ended up painting two bells with their names on them and underneath, he wrote “Ding Dong” as a joke. The community was called Ding Dong from then on. Today, it’s estimated that there are less than 50 people living there. 

Point Blank

The urge to say “PERIOD” after this one is strong. With less than 700 residents, Point Blank sits off Lake Livingston, just east of Huntsville. In the 1800s, a woman working as a governess in the area named the city Blanc Point—blanc meaning “white” in French. Later the name was changed to Point Blank, a classic example of words being mispronounced or Texanized. 

Noodle

Noodle is an unincorporated community in West Texas that is named after Noodle Creek. It’s said that the creek got its name because there was nothing in it, it was dried up. The population today is less than 5,000. 

Uncertain

When this city was being incorporated in the 1960s, original residents filled out the application not knowing what the area should be called, so they wrote “uncertain” and that was filed as the city name. This outdoorsman’s paradise has less than 100 residents, but spans 171 square-miles on the Texas-Louisiana border. 

Getty Images/ Wanderluster

Oatmeal 

You could fit the people that live in Oatmeal into a single school bus. Do we call them oats? Among the area’s area’s first settlers were a German gristmill owner by the name of Mr. Othneil. It’s thought that the town name is simply a mispronunciation of his name, but the grain/oatmeal irony is just too good to overlook. Check out the town’s water tower that was designed to look like a carton of oatmeal. 

Bug Tussle

Texans love that there’s a town named Bug Tussle — so much that more than 70 of its highway signs have been stolen. The unincorporated community—population 15— is said to have gotten its name from a swarm of bugs that interrupted an ice cream social. There are other stories, but whichever the real one is was impactful enough to inspire residents to change the name from Truss to Big Tussle. 

Loco

Loco, Texas isn’t a town of crazy people. It was named after its abundance of locoweed, a plant that is harmful to livestock and is the most prevalent poisonous plant in the west. But a town named after an invasive poison is kinda crazy, right?

Cut and Shoot

Forty miles north of Houston, there’s Cut and Shoot, with a population of just under 1,200. The name comes from a conflict surrounding a new church that was being built in 1912. There allegedly was so much tension that a little boy was scared and wanted to get away from the fight, so he said “I’m going to cut around the corner and shoot through the bushes in a minute.” The moment stuck and the town adopted Cut and Shoot as a name. Later the town would be made famous as the hometown of heavyweight boxer Roy Harris. 

Jot Em Down

Last time we (the Texas State Historical Association) checked, Jot Em Down was a community of 10 people. Originally known as Mohegan and the Muddig Prairie, Jot Em Down got its name from a local gin company, which took its name from the imaginary radio store featured on the radio comedy Lum and Abner, which ran  from the 1930s through the 1950s. 

Bigfoot

With roughly 500 residents, Bigfoot is quite small, only spanning 23 square miles. The name honors former Texas Ranger William A. A. “Bigfoot” Wallace, a resident of the town in the late 1800s. Wallace, a soldier who fought in the Mexican War, was a brawny 6’2, 240lbs. And to address what you really want to know—there have been no Bigfoot sightings in Bigfoot, Texas. What a bummer!