We’re All Wrong About How Many Lakes Minnesota Really Has

Minnesota's famous slogan, "Land of 10,000 Lakes" is a total myth.

By now, I think most people have at least heard that the number is at least a little bigger than that. Yes, Minnesota has a lot of lakes. 10,000 is a nice, round number that sounds nice (and looks good on a license plate), so we all just go along with it.

Where does the phrase 'Land of 10,000 Lakes' come from?

The Star Tribune says the phrase dates back to 1874, when a professor speaking at the Minnesota State Fair used it. How appropriate that something like that would come from the Great Minnesota Get-Together. right?

READ MORE: The Little-Known App Minnesota First Responders Swear By That You Need

A Duluth-based TV & online production called "Minnesota Historia" explains that the phrase popped up again during World War I, eventually getting adopted as a marketing slogan and becoming a part of the state's license plates in 1950.

How many lakes does Minnesota actually have?

That's a complicated answer.

I've seen a lot of online resources claim Minnesota actually has somewhere between 11,000 and 12,000 lakes. One popular number that's been used is 11,842 lakes, popularized by an MPR piece. In the Star Tribune piece I mentioned above, they say Minnesota has 14,444 lakes.

Why are there so many drastically different answers? It all comes down to how you define what a lake is.

Get our free mobile app

I find myself trusting what the team at the Minnesota Sea Grant has to say. They explain in a 2021 article that most of the numbers used come from limnologists, or lake scientists, who offer educated guesses based on firm counts of larger lakes and estimates of smaller lakes.

The issue is how small is the smallest lake? That's where things get really murky. One person's pond might be another person's lake. What's the line between the two?

The Minnesota DNR says the state has over 117,000 bodies of water. That said, some of those water bodies are pretty tiny. The most agreed-upon answer for what a "lake" is versus a "pond" is 10 acres. Any body of water 10 acres in size or larger is a lake. Smaller than that? It's a pond.

READ MORE: This lake was named the 'prettiest lake' in Minnesota

With that definition in mind, the Minnesota Sea Grant says (using data from the Minnesota DNR) that Minnesota has a total of 14,380 lakes. That includes everything 10 acres and larger and lakes that cross the Minnesota-Canada border, and excludes a few that share a state border but are mostly outside of Minnesota.

So, while the slogan "Land of 10,000 Lakes" isn't technically inaccurate - we do have at least that many - it is pretty significant undersell.

How appropriate, right? Minnesota being all modest about the number of lakes it really has is kind of like not wanting to take the last of any food item at a gathering.