‘Winnipiseogee’ (pronounced Win’ ni pe sauk’ e,) is compounded of winni, nippe, and sauki, ‘good-water discharge,’ and the name must have belonged originally to the outlet by which the waters of the lake pass to the Merrimack, rather than to the lake itself.  Winnepesauke, Wenepesioco and (with the locative) Winnipesiockett, are among the early forms of the name.  The translation of this synthesis by ‘the Smile of the Great Spirit’ is sheer nonsense.  Another, first proposed by the late Judge Potter of New Hampshire, in his History of Manchester (p. 27),[73]—­’the beautiful water of the high place,’—­is demonstrably wrong.  It assumes that is or es represents kees, meaning ‘high;’ to which assumption there are two objections:  first, that there is no evidence that such a word as kees, meaning ‘high,’ is found in any Algonkin language, and secondly, that if there be such a word, it must retain its significant root, in any synthesis of which it makes part,—­in other words, that kees could not drop its initial k and preserve its meaning.  I was at first inclined to accept the more probable translation proposed by ‘S.F.S.’ [S.F.  Streeter?] in the Historical Magazine for August, 1857,[74]—­“the land of the placid or beautiful lake;” but, in the dialects of New England, nippisse or nips, a diminutive of nippe, ‘water,’ is never used for paug, ‘lake’ or ’standing water;’[75] and if it were sometimes so used, the extent of Lake Winnepiseogee forbids it to be classed with the ’small lakes’ or ‘ponds,’ to which, only, the diminutive is appropriate.

[Footnote 73:  And in the Historical Magazine, vol. i. p. 246.]

[Footnote 74:  Vol. i. p. 246.]

[Footnote 75:  See pp. 14, 15.]

4.  NASHAUE (Chip. nassawaii and ashawiwi), ‘mid-way,’ or ‘between,’ and with ohke or auk added, ‘the land between’ or ’the half-way place,’—­was the name of several localities.  The tract on which Lancaster, in Worcester county (Mass.) was settled, was ‘between’ the branches of the river, and so it was called ‘Nashaway’ or ‘Nashawake’ (nashaue-ohke); and this name was afterwards transferred from the territory to the river itself.  There was another Nashaway in Connecticut, between Quinnebaug and Five-Mile Rivers in Windham county, and here, too, the mutilated name of the nashaue-ohke was transferred, as Ashawog or Assawog, to the Five-Mile River. Natchaug in the same county, the name of the eastern branch of Shetucket river, belonged originally to the tract ‘between’ the eastern and western branches; and the Shetucket itself borrows a name (nashaue-tuk-ut) from its place ‘between’ Yantic and Quinebaug rivers.  A neck of land (now in Griswold, Conn.) “between Pachaug River and a brook that comes into it from the south,” one of the Muhhekan east boundaries, was called sometimes, Shawwunk, ’at the place between,’—­sometimes Shawwamug (nashaue-amaug), ’the fishing-place between’ the rivers, or the ’half-way fishing-place.’[76]