About 2,500 years ago the ancient Romans placed a temple to the god Jupiter on one of their city’s seven hills. That temple ended up giving its name to the hill itself: in Latin, Capitolium (from the word for "head"); in Italian, Capitolino; and eventually, in English, Capitoline.

Many years later, when settlers in Jamestown, Virginia, needed to rebuild their burnt down government hall in 1699, they decided to call their new one “by the name of Capitoll.” This usage didn’t spread until in the early 1790s, when the nascent U.S. government was planning out what we think of, rightfully, as the other Washington.

In his initial plans, architect Pierre Charles L’Enfant called the building that would house the legislature “Government House”—simple enough. But Thomas Jefferson, then serving as Secretary of State, had his own ideas. Thanks to his influence, Government House became the Capitol. Capitol hill became Capitol Hill. And so it went around the country, as the buildings that housed state legislatures, including the one in Olympia, became known as capitols.

Obviously, there is no actual capitol in Seattle’s Capitol Hill. There is no temple to an ancient Roman deity, either. So, why is it called that? Well, like anything with real estate, the answer probably has to do with money.

The man who developed what we now know as Capitol Hill into a residential and urban center around the turn of the twentieth century was a developer named James Moore. Previously the area had been generally known as Broadway Hill.

Then in 1901, Moore convinced a Seattle-area legislator to propose a bill offering the state of Washington a free parcel of land on which to erect a new capital building, thus moving the seat of government from Olympia to Seattle. He may have changed the name of the neighborhood in hopes that doing so would be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It wasn’t. The bill never went anywhere, and the proposal may not have even been serious—but it did whip up attention. Some people also believe that Moore renamed Broadway Hill in honor of his wife, who was from Denver, a city that already had its own Capitol Hill neighborhood.

Regardless, the neighborhood got a new name. And more than a century later, the name has stuck. Just don’t call it Cap Hill.