What do you call a person from Connecticut? Today we’d call them a Connecticuter or a Connecticutian (or, colloquially, a Nutmegger), but in a 1987 address etymologist Allen Walker Read announced that he’d also found these options:
- Connecticotian, used in 1702 by Cotton Mather
- Connecticutensian, used in 1781 by historian Samuel Peters
- Connectican, used in 1942 in a letter to the Baltimore Evening Sun
- Connecticutan, used in 1946 by book reviewer John Cournos
- Connecticutite, used in 1968 by an anonymous reviewer in Playboy
He also found several jocular forms:
- Connecticutie, a pretty girl of Connecticut (used in 1938 by Frank Sullivan of Mrs. Heywood Broun and in 1947 by a journalist about Clare Boothe Luce)
- Connecticanuck, a Connecticut person of French background
- Connectikook, an oddball or eccentric from Connecticut
- Connecticutup, a prankster from Connecticut
“Especially in language, exuberance accounts for much that happens.”
(Allen Walker Read, “Exuberance, a Motivation for Language,” (Word Ways 21:2 [May 1988], 71-74. He gives his documentation in “What Connecticut People Can Call Themselves,” Connecticut Onomastic Review No. 2, 1981, 3-23. In 1992 he took up the same question regarding “Americans.”)