Lake Superior
largest of the Great Lakes of North America
Lake Superior is a lake in central North America. The northernmost, westernmost, and highest of the Great Lakes, Lake Superior straddles the Canada–United States border with the Canadian province of Ontario to the north and east and the U.S. states of Minnesota to the west and Michigan and Wisconsin to the south. It is the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area and the third-largest freshwater lake by volume. It drains into Lake Huron via St. Marys River, then through the lower Great Lakes to the St. Lawrence River and ultimately the Atlantic Ocean.
Name
The Ojibwe name for the lake is gichi-gami (in syllabics: ᑭᒋᑲᒥ, pronounced gitchi-gami or kitchi-gami in different dialects), meaning "great sea". Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote this name as "Gitche Gumee" in the poem The Song of Hiawatha, as did Gordon Lightfoot in his song "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald".
According to other sources, the full Ojibwe name is ᐅᒋᑉᐧᐁ ᑭᒋᑲᒥ Ojibwe Gichigami ("Ojibwe's Great Sea") or ᐊᓂᐦᔑᓈᐯ ᑭᒋᑲᒥ Anishinaabe Gichigami ("Anishinaabe's Great Sea"). The 1853 dictionary by Father Frederic Baraga, the first one written for the Ojibway language, gives the Ojibwe name as Otchipwe-kitchi-gami (a transliteration of Ojibwe Gichigami).
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1066. VIAF identifies the subject as 5482149198224874940009. The Library of Congress control number is sh85130609. Authority coordinates are 47.529, -87.760. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1853.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lake Superior” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.