Pronouncing “Placer” in Mining

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Keith Chambers from Northern Idaho.

Hi, Keith.

And my question was regarding the word PLACER.

PLACER?

Yes.

Okay.

So I grew up in an area that is a mining area.

Naturally, everyone around us uses, when they see that word, they say it as placer, which is placer mining or placer gold.

And we a few years back moved to a town that is it’s only about 50 miles away from the area that

I grew up in but there was a street that was spelled p-l-a-c-e-r and so just as an experiment

I would ask people how they would say that the name of that road and invariably they would say

Placer just because they had never heard of the word placer and no one really uses that word

Placer, and just because they’d never been around any kind of a mining area, and they were just far

Enough away that they didn’t know that word Placer, and they just read it phonetically, basically.

So they called it Placer, Placer Street. And so I didn’t find anyone over there, even though it’s

Less than an hour away geographically, no one that I came across pronounced it as Placer,

And no one knew what the word Placer meant. Yeah, I could see that totally happening in so

Many parts of this country because that specialized mining use of placer, P-L-A-C-E-R, doesn’t

Really extend to the rest of the population.

Plus, as you said, our best guess on a word like P-L-A-C-E-R, we’re going to look at that

A, we’re going to look at that C as a consonant, we’re going to look at that E, we’re going

To say placer every time unless we’ve heard it said another way.

So I get that.

I totally get that.

Here in California, we have Placer County.

So there’s a large part of California that knows that there is another placer out there.

But I don’t know that everyone, you know, we’re a long way from the mining days, the gold rush days.

I’m not sure that everyone knows what a placer is.

Can you tell us what it is?

Placer is usually in, I think it’s alluvial, the word for it.

It’s gold that’s been worn out or whatever your mineral that you’re after.

It’s been worn out of the bedrock and is placed in the gravels or sand deposits in a stream.

Right.

So when you pan for gold, you’re looking for placer gold, not bedrock gold, but placer gold.

Right. So you might have a sandy bank along a river.

That’s what you start panning with, and that’s your placer.

Right.

Yeah, the interesting history to that is it ultimately comes from another language altogether,

From Catalan, which is a language spoken in Spain.

And it means something like a shoal or a shore or a bank in Catalan.

And ultimately it goes back to the same word in Latin that we get plaza from

And that we get place from.

So it’s really interesting, all these tangled kind of connections there.

Yeah, and it’s confusing too because if you know Spanish, placer means pleasure.

And so…

It’s different.

Yeah, so when I first saw that word used in that context, I was really confused.

We do have placer as a word in English, but it’s also rare.

They’re both kind of rare in their own way.

Like you might say somebody was the second placer in the hog-calling competition or what have you,

Or a placer is a thing that might keep your place in a book in certain literary or religious traditions.

The only time I’ve heard the word placer is like in construction they have material placers,

Basically machines with big treadmills, and you can place dirt or rocks or whatever.

There you go, yeah.

So anyway, that’s the story between those two pronunciations.

And I suspect that the Placer street where you live probably originally was Placer,

But I totally understand why it’s Placer now.

You’re right, yeah.

All right.

Well, thank you very much.

Keith, thank you for your call.

Really appreciate it.

Have a good day.

Take care.

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