FLORENCE, Ala. (AP) — The speed limit in Zip City is a modest 45 mph. Burnout has a volunteer fire department.

Welcome to the strange world of community names.

Whether you’re staying Active or Hopeful, feeling Normal or Cluttsville, or striving for Equality or Reform — many communities and some towns across Alabama have head-scratching names.

Unusual Alabama community names have caused visitors to chuckle and townsfolk to defend the likes of Boar Tush, Hicks, Intercourse, Nymph and Pansey, to name a few.

Some town and community names can even get edgier — Crackpot (United Kingdom), Ballplay (Tennessee), Titty Ho (United Kingdom) and Zip Down (Pennsylvania) come to mind.

Alabama has 462 incorporated towns, a sliver of the 19,495 cities and towns tabulated by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2007. In many cases, however, unusual names come from the hundreds of unincorporated communities with no political structure, as is the case with Zip City, Burnout and Buzzard Roost — three unincorporated communities in northwest Alabama.

One of the most complete sources of information on local town and community names comes from “The Place Names of Colbert and Lauderdale Counties, Alabama” — a dissertation written by Sandra Sockwell for her Ph.D. in the English department at the University of Alabama in 1985.

The two-volume, nearly 700-page work catalogues towns, communities, churches, roads, ponds - nearly any geographic feature named by man. The account comes from public records and interviews with old-timers.

Sockwell called the study of community and town names “a branch of linguistics that I got interested in.”

The names project was the brainchild of Virginia Foscue, who in 1988 published “Place Names in Alabama.”

During one summer, Sockwell and her daughter navigated the two counties, looking over dusty records of commission meetings and interviewing elders in the community.

What do the names tell her about the area?

“How unimaginative we are,” Sockwell said with a laugh. “We were working-class, ordinary people who faced a lot of hardships and they weren’t very fanciful with their names.”

One of her favorites is Zip City, “about as imaginative and fanciful that you get around here,” she said.

Another favorite: Needmore, an older reference of the Seven Points area in Florence, which was not included in the book but a reference to “need more customers, need more traffic.”