Hoboken (Belgium)

Hoboken is a southern district of the arrondissement and city of Antwerp, in the Flemish Region of Belgium.

[edit] Trivia

A local children's story says that the name "Hoboken" is derived from a little boy who accidentally dropped his sandwich in the Scheldt, a river which flows through Hoboken. In the local dialect of Dutch/Flemish, a "boken" is a sandwich and "ho" is a way of shouting "stop", so he must have shouted "Ho, boken!!!". The placename is actually derived from Old Dutch Hooghe Buechen or Hoge Beuken, meaning High Beeches or Tall Beeches. To this day there is a hospital in Hoboken named "Hoge Beuken".

Since the first Europeans to live there were Dutch-speaking settlers to New Netherlands, it would appear Hoboken, New Jersey, on the Hudson river across from New York is named after Hoboken, Antwerp. Many European immigrants who set sail headed for New York from the port of Antwerp and eventually settled in New Jersey, but by that time the city had long been called Hoboken, a name chosen by John Stevens, the man who purchased the land on which the city sits in 1784. It's not known why he did. The Lenape/Delaware Indian for the area was Hobocan Hackingh. Speakers of the Nederduits, which was the Dutch dialect of the 17th century, may have phonetically bastardized the Lenape to conform to their own language. Various English-language spellings from the colonial era included Hoebuck and Hobuck.