course of administrative restructuring in Rhineland-Palatinate in 1968, the old Bürgermeistereien were dissolved. In 1972, Lauterecken became, after many authorities, such as the office of weights and measures, the financial office, the local court and the customs office had been withdrawn from the town, the seat of a Verbandsgemeinde administration within the Kusel district with all together 25 Ortsgemeinden. Population development The following table shows population development over the centuries for Lauterecken, with some figures broken down by religious denomination: Town’s name About the roots of the name Lauterecken, there has been disagreement among the locally based regional historians. The two sides can be roughly broken down as follows: The town arose next to a valley castle between the Glan and the Lauter; The town lay at the foot of a hill castle named Lautereck. The former, which relates the name ending to the town's geographical location, has thus far been held to be the right one and it was even supported by earlier placename researchers and compilers of town descriptions (Widder, Pöhlmann, Christmann and nowadays Karl Pfleger). Quite recently, researcher Martin Dolch has had slight doubts about the name, noting that where the Glan meets the Lauter, it does not form an Ecke (the last element in the town's name, and also German for "corner"), that is to say, a wedge-shaped point of land (for a well known German example of one of these, see Deutsches Eck). Those who propound the latter theory point to the hill castles that bear names ending in —eck (Schlosseck, Sponeck, etc.). The name itself does not crop up in documents before the 14th century. Older names that the town has borne are iuxtra Luterecke (later edition of Prüm Abbey’s directory of holdings, the Prümer Urbar), die burge und dorffe zu Lutrecken (copy from 1343), in die borg zu Lutereckin oder in die stad dar vor (1350) and Luterecken burg vnd stat (1387, first mention in an original document). Neither of those theories, though, explains the origin of the prefix Lauter—; however, another source deals with that by saying that the town is named after the little river, the Lauter, which rises at the northern edge of the Palatinate Forest southeast of Kaiserslautern and flows 35 km down to Lauterecken, where its water – which according to the name was once lauter (meaning "clean", although the word is now obsolete in this sense) –