Jeff Ball of the Ministry of Natural Resources Provincial Georeferencing Unit says there are no official word order policies for the naming of geographic features beyond the board's primary principle that the name be established in common usage. "In other words," he says, "we don't name features so much as simply record what name is being used by the local community and local government."

You're right, however, that names beginning with "Lake" or "Lac" are rare in Ontario - there are about 100, compared with more than 22,000 names that work the other way. There seem to be, Ball says, some unofficial criteria at work in the 100 or so lake-first names. A few he suggests are: a) size, as in the Great Lakes and others (like Lake Timiskaming); b) significance to the community, as in lakes named after military heroes or great chiefs (Lake Seneca), or tragic events (Lake Despair); c) significance of a particular feature (Lake of Bays); d) historic French names (Lake Doré,); e) saints' names (Lake St. George); and f) the very imaginative "coded names," such as Lake Twenty-three or Lake One, which were probably established by a government agency to help administer an area.