Courtesy of the City of Westminster
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The city of Westminster has been around for a while … since 1911, to be exact.
Even so, people still don’t know how to pronounce its name. It doesn’t seem necessarily difficult, involving a common cardinal direction and only three vowels. But there’s enough confusion that Rob in Arvada asks, “Why do some people incorrectly call the suburb Westminster by the name, WestminISter? Can they not read? Do they think it’s funny? Help me understand this annoying topic!”
For the latest edition of our Weekly WTF series, we dove into how to say Westminster.
West… Minister?
The answer is pretty simple: the word “Westminster,” which describes a central borough (originally in England), is pronounced West-min-ster, not West-min-ister. There’s no extra “i,” but people have been getting it wrong for decades. No, it’s not just recent transplants to Denver who can’t pronounce the name of one of the metro’s most prominent cities. In fact, the problem may be embedded in the city’s history.
“Oh, yes,” Mary Oswell, a volunteer with the Westminster Historical Society, says of the mispronunciation, and laughs. “I ran into this shortly after I moved here.”
A resident of Westminster since 2012, Oswell was recently talking to someone about the mispronunciation, who said it came from his grandparents back in the 1910s. But Oswell wonders if it can be pinpointed in the post-World War II era, when the population boomed…and new residents picked up some bad habits.
“No one has connected the story far enough back yet,” she explains, “but through my research, it has always felt like an old-timey pronunciation that came out of that era when we were really, really small.”
A little history
Westminster was just a patch of farmland in the late 19th century. Pleasant DeSpain was the first settler in the area and, in 1870, created the DeSpain homestead — 80 acres north of West 76th Avenue between Lowell and Federal Boulevard. C.J. Harris, a real estate developer from Connecticut, came to the area in 1885 and started dividing the land into smaller parcels for fruit farmers, according to “A Place and Time,” a study published by the Westminster Historical Society.
In the early days, the area was called Harris Park, but when New Yorker Henry Mayham convinced the Denver Presbytery to build a university in the 1890s, things changed. The college was built and titled the Westminster University of Colorado in 1892. The term “Westminster” has often been connected to the religion and so has “minister,” so the connection could lie there.
By 1908, the local post office had switched to using “Westminster,” and when the area became a city in 1911, the name was official.
“People were pushing for a city connected to the university,” Oswell says. “The university was trying to make itself known, overlapping the post office, the university and the train station.”
Big boom
In 1950, Westminster’s population was 1,686, but after the construction of the Denver-Boulder Turnpike, the city took off, with the population skyrocketing to 13,850 by 1960.
“Until after the Second World War, there were literally 500 people in the city. You’re talking a very tiny group of people,” Oswell says. “If the mispronunciation was widely used, it would have been swept up in so many new people.”
Now, years and years later, Westminster has a population of over 115,000, its first downtown area, and a collection of bars and restaurants to explore. And people still mispronounce its name.
At least you can argue over how to pronounce “Westminster” while drinking beer in one of those new bars.
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