Idaho is a former featured article candidate. Please view the links under Article milestones below to see why the nomination was archived. For older candidates, please check the archive.
Article milestones Date Process Result May 18, 2006 Featured article candidate Not promoted November 17, 2012 Good article nominee Not listed
Current status: Former featured article candidate

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This page has archives. Topics inactive for 90 days are automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III if there are more than 2.

It began around 2009 officially and wrapped up around 2018. Not 2019 as stated. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper%27s_Ferry_site 2600:100A:B1C0:80DD:0:F:8D43:301 (talk) 19:58, 21 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Twice the word "landlocked" has been removed from the first sentence. Per landlocked country, landlocked refers to having no ocean coastline, not necessarily having no seaports.

What ocean does Idaho touch? —C.Fred (talk) 01:34, 17 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

nothing, it borders canada to the north, oregon and washington to the west, montana and colorado to the east, and utah to the south. it has no ocean access. ~2025-37654-69 (talk) 04:03, 1 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There's two things about the etymology section of this article that seems worth the consideration of changing. 1) is that things progressed historically as suggested in the section as it says now, but the story of the little girl named Ida is thought by the cited man, Erl H. Ellis, to be apocryphal (well, he actually calls it a "fiction" told by an "imaginative writer" cx). It was told first by a journalist named William O. Stoddard in 1875, who calls Willing "late" at the start of the article, indicating this was written after his death This also indicates that it's unknown if Willing himself actually claimed that he invented the word, or if Stoddard was the one who originated the claim. This is from a pamphlet that Ellis published on the subject of the toponym "Idaho" in 1951 (the same year as his book Western Folklore, so I suspect that the pamphlet exists thanks to his research during it) titled That Word "Idaho". Unfortunately, this pamphlet--which extensively looks at the early instances of the word "Idaho" in the written record--is not easily accessible at all and it's only because I live in Idaho and have access to nearby local record hoards that I was able to track a copy down. At least, that's from my research. Perhaps there's a resource I'm missing that could be more easily cited and accessible.

The second thing worth mention is that it seems an omission to not have the conclusion of one William O. Bright, considered a foremost scholar in the realm of specifically Native American place name toponymy. He, and others before and since, have suggested that Idaho has origins in the Kiowa-Apache language. It's suggested that ídaahę́ was the word used to refer to specifically the Comanche tribe and meant "enemy". Bright theorizes that the change from e to o was based on "a misreading of some frontiersman's handwriting". He wrote about this etymology for Idaho most notably in Native American Placenames of the United States (available here from the Internet Archive) on page 177 and there he sources a brief article he'd done before on the matter in the newsletter for The Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas in 1999, their 18th volume, which they have archived, but is accessible only to members.

Since this is a major page and am not usually an editor/inexperienced, I do not want to rock the boat and edit the page unnecessarily so I thought it best to mention things here to suggest the changes. ~2025-39222-46 (talk) 08:23, 8 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]