What's in a name? A lot, it seems, especially in the USA's varied national parks. These vast landscapes of pristine and brilliant nature, teeming with wildlife, plants and rare geological formations, have history – much of which can be told simply through their names. Some are named after people, while others have Native American names with intriguing meanings. Here's the lowdown on how 15 of America's national parks got their monikers.

This 47,000-acre national park in Maine is best known for its granite peaks and forested hills, but its name has an interesting backstory. Although, "names" is more accurate, as this park has been renamed numerous times. Originally called Sieur de Monts National Monument, then renamed in 1919 to Lafayette National Park, its name today has French roots.

Given in 1929, the name Acadia is a nod to the eponymous former French colony which used to occupy the land we now know as Maine. The Acadians settled here in the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as across what we now know as New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island in Canada.

Spread across the Sierra Nevada mountains, Yosemite is one of America's most popular national parks. This Californian gem is impressive, with its dramatic rock formations and forested mountains, and hundreds-strong population of American black bears. Its name is derived from a Miwok word given to the Ahwahneechee people, who were native to this land and whose ancestors still reside here.

It's believed the Miwok native people feared the Ahwahneechee tribes, and so they were called "Yosemite", or "killers". This is how the Yosemite Valley got its name, and how the national park we know today got its moniker. The only killers in the area now, though, are those omnivorous black bears and the rare but elegant mountain lions that prowl throughout the park, preying on raccoons or coyotes.

Enormous and remote, located in the wilds of Alaska, Denali National Park is simply staggering in terms of its natural beauty and untouched landscapes. A hike here could mean scaling mountains, exploring thick forest or walking across glaciers. The national park is named after North America's highest mountain, Mount Denali, but it hasn't always been known this way.

Formerly named Mount McKinley National Park after US president William McKinley, the National Park Service changed the park's name to Denali in 2015, on the eve of its 100th anniversary, to acknowledge its original, native name. Denali is an Athabaskan word meaning "the tall one", referring to Mount Denali (also formerly Mount McKinley), which towers an impressive 20,310 feet (6,190m) above sea level.

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Sitting between Cleveland and Akron in Ohio, Cuyahoga National Park has a quiet, understated beauty. Over 30,000 acres of hills, farmland and forest make this an idyllic place for hiking and cycling, or riding historic steam trains that chug through the landscape. It's the Cuyahoga River that offers the most enticing activities, though, with angling and kayaking available, and it's the river that gives this park its name.

"Cuyahoga" is thought to originate from the Native American Mohawk word, "cayagaga", which means "crooked river", and indeed this waterway twists and turns through the eponymous valley. Though it's also thought that the local Seneca people called it "Cuyohaga", which means "place of the jawbone", perhaps another reference to the river's shape.

Diversity is the draw at Olympic National Park in Washington State, as this near million-acre reserve encompasses rainforest, 70 miles (112km) of coastline and glacier-capped mountains. There are lakes for boating and fishing, trails for day hikes and stargazing programmes, thanks to the region's dark skies. It's almost as varied as the myriad sports involved in the Olympics, but this park's name has nothing to do with the international competition.

Instead, it's named after Mount Olympus, the tallest mountain in the range at 7,990 feet (2,432m), which was named by Captain John Meares, an English explorer. He thought the peak was a home fit for the gods and so dubbed it Olympus after the sacred mountain in Greece, home of the Greek gods in ancient mythology. While you can't scale the mountain unless you're an incredibly experienced climber, it's visible from all over the park and the views of it from the ground are heavenly enough.

Way back when French fur trappers were passing through North America, they called this region of South Dakota "les mauvais terres a traverser", which literally translates as "bad lands for crossing". For hundreds of years, the Lakota people have also described this area as "mako sica", which translates to "bad lands". This is largely due to the area's harsh terrain – its lack of water and rocky surfaces meant it was tricky to traverse. The name has stuck in its English form to this day.

Badlands National Park is still pretty rocky and parched, but it's not so bad to travel through these days thanks to the many hiking trails that make its dramatic and unusual landscapes accessible. Take a walk here and you'll get to see fossils from the now-extinct animals that once thrived here. You can also meet the bighorn sheep and deer that roam the region, and gaze upon some of the most striking geologic formations in the USA.

Originally called Mukuntuweap National Monument, named so by explorer John Wesley Powell, who believed this to be the Paiute name for the area, Zion got its new moniker in 1863. It was all down to Isaac Behunin, a Mormon pioneer who settled in the area to farm tobacco and fruit trees. He thought it so peaceful that he should rename it Zion, because, as he wrote: "A man can worship God among these great cathedrals as well as he can in any man-made church; this is Zion.”

The great cathedrals he mentioned were probably the incredible, precipitous red cliffs that rise up on both sides of the Virgin River. In Christianity, "zion" means "heavenly place", and standing atop the cliffs or even at their foot, it's easy to see why Behunin thought it a divine landscape. 

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It was in 1872 that Yellowstone became the USA's first ever national park, set to be preserved for its hydrothermal features and intriguing geological formations. It's the Old Faithful geysir that gets most attention here, its boiling blue waters surrounded by iridescent yellow and orange bacterial deposits, but there's lots more to love. Take a bear watching trip, see the park's bolshy bison population, and stroll along a series of boardwalks that cross over the steaming Norris Geyser Basin. 

It's none of these features that gave the park its name, though. The park is named after the river that flows through it. "Yellowstone" comes from the native American Minnetaree language: they used to call the river here "Mi tse a-da-zi", which literally means "yellow rock river", so that's how the world-famous national park got its name, too.

If you're afraid of alligators, you might want to avoid the Everglades National Park in Florida. These reptiles roam the waters of this wetland region in their hundreds of thousands, hiding between the grasses and sinking beneath the surface as they stalk their prey. You might even spot them crossing the Anhinga Trail, one of the park's most popular walking routes which takes you over sawgrass marshes.

It was these marshes with their tall, thick grasses that gave the region its name. It's thought that when explorers first landed here they saw endless fields of grass, so they called it the Everglades, which was an old English word for an open, grassy place. Of course, this wasn't its first name: the Native Americans in the region called it "Pa-hay-Okee", which means "grassy waters".

This name is quite the mouthful, there's no denying it, but its meaning is far more simple. The Gunnison is the river that flows through this national park, and the Black Canyon is named so for the black lichen that cling to the towering walls of its cliffs, giving the chasm a somewhat gloomy feel. There's nothing to be gloomy about here, though, as this national park thrives with interesting wildlife and spectacular views.

Expect to see deer, bobcats and golden and bald eagles, and don't miss the opportunity to get up close and personal with some of the USA's oldest rocks in the world, some of which were formed 1.8 billion years ago. The Black Canyon is living up to its name in another way too these days: it has been designated an International Dark Sky Reserve thanks to the dearth of light pollution, so come here to see sparkling skies on dark, clear nights. 

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This national park centres around the Teton mountain range, a towering landscape of rocky, snow-dusted peaks in Wyoming. Here you can enjoy backcountry camping, boating on glassy lakes, or hiking on over 200 miles (321km) of trails. It's rather obvious that the park gets its name from the eponymous mountain range, but how that got its name is a far less simple explanation.

In a somewhat silly backstory, many believe it was French explorers – starved of their home comforts and wives – who named the mountains "les trois tétons" after the mounds on a woman's body. A more sensible and sobering story, though, says they were named after the Teton Sioux people who once lived here.

In the arid Sonoran Desert, this national park teems with wildlife, insects and plants. Horned lizards, roadrunners and the ominously named gila monsters are just some of the animals that call this harsh landscape home, while bees and beetles flit about in the air. It's the plants that most people come for though, and it's one plant in particular that has given the park its name: the saguaro cactus.

If you were to ask a child to draw a cactus, it's likely they'd sketch out something that looks like a saguaro, which has a thick trunk and vertically reaching "arms" covered in fine spikes. It's estimated there are almost two million of these iconic plants throughout the national park, so it's hardly surprising they've been given the limelight in the Arizona park's name. 

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A UNESCO World Heritage Site and Dark Sky Reserve, this national park has a lot to preserve. If you visit, make sure you see the incredible homes carved into and built around the rocky, sandstone landscape. Dating back to around AD 550, these dwellings housed the Ancestral Puebloans who lived in this region for more than 700 years, and there are 5,000 or so archaeological sites to explore within the national park.

Exploration is how the park got its name. When Spanish explorers in the American Southwest first came upon these towering rock formations, they said it looked like a landscape of tables, covered with foliage and forest. They named it "Mesa Verde", which is Spanish for "green table".

Few landscapes are as otherworldly as this. Set on the island of Maui around a pair of dormant volcanoes, Haleakalā National Park is simply breathtaking – so much so, it attracts over one million visitors each year. Mount Haleakalā gave this national park its name, which is thought to derive from a famous Polynesian legend about how demigod Maui lassoed the sun so his mother could dry her wet tapa cloth.

The legend says that he stopped the sun in its tracks across the sky from the top of Mount Haleakalā, and would only let it go when it promised to slow down and give more light to the island. Haleakalā translates as "House of the Sun", and to this day tourists flock to its landscape at dawn to capture the sun in their own way: with their cameras.

An ominous name such as this could be enough to put off plenty of visitors to this national park, but ignore the doom-laden moniker and you'll be richly rewarded: Death Valley is really quite astonishing. It has a host of accolades to take in: it's the lowest basin in the USA, the driest desert in North America and some of the country's highest temperatures have been recorded here over the years, including up to 57°C (134°F) in 1913.

The name Death Valley was given to the area by a group of pioneers who got lost here in 1949. Only one of their group actually died on their unfortunate expedition, but as they were rescued by a pair of fellow pioneers, one turned back and said "goodbye, death valley". And so the name stuck. That's not to say it's totally safe here, mind. There are increasing numbers of deaths in the national park each year due to cliff falls and dehydration.

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