Provo

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A city in Utah, home to Brigham Young University, located in the central part of the state in Utah County
2. A municipality located in central Utah known for its association with an esteemed university and as part of a larger county area
3. A central Utah city recognized for being the site of a prominent educational institution and its picturesque surroundings

Etymology: The word "Provo" names two unrelated things, and the Utah city is the one that bears the name of a trapper. The city was named after Étienne Provost, a mountain man and trapper of French-Canadian background who worked the Rocky Mountain fur trade in the early nineteenth century. The settlement took his name, and the spelling shifted from "Provost" to the shorter "Provo" over time, so the city carries a surname rather than any descriptive or Latin root. Elsewhere in the same name space, the word has an entirely different origin. In Dutch, "Provo" was a shortened form of "provoceren," meaning "to provoke," itself borrowed from French "provoquer." Dutch "Provo" was the name of an activist movement in Amsterdam in the 1960s, and it is a clipping of that verb rather than a relative of the Utah place name. The two are connected only by coincidence of spelling. A third source is a clipping of "provisional" with the suffix "-o," which produced a separate use of the form. This is unrelated to both the trapper's surname and the Dutch movement.

Synonyms: provocation, provoke