North Platte
- proper noun
- /nɔrθ plæt/
Examples
-
North Platte, it's a city in Nebraska.
-
Many anglers visit the North Platte River to catch rainbow trout each spring.
-
The North Platte flows southeast through Nebraska before joining the South Platte River.
-
The scenic beauty along the North Platte attracts photographers and nature lovers alike.
Synonyms
A river in central United States that starts in Colorado and joins the South Platte to form the Platte River
Surface Forms
Morphology
This is a compositional place name: 'Platte' identifies a river and 'North' specifies its geographic/branching relation, so a learner who knows both words can infer it denotes the northern branch or section of the Platte River. The cardinal + river-name pattern is widely used cross-linguistically, so the meaning is immediately derivable rather than idiomatic.
Etymology
North Platte comes from early French trappers who called the wide, shallow river Platte, a word meaning 'flat'. The word North simply marks it as the northern branch, so today North Platte is the name of that river in the western United States.