Technically, the English name is a misunderstanding, being named after , the 'little loch of the noisy sound', a to be found in the mountain's northeast corrie. Today the is popularly called Lochnagar too. The summit itself may be referred to as , meaning small cairn of faeces in Scottish Gaelic, or less euphemistically, 'little pile of shit'. Peter Drummond, former chairman of the Architectural Heritage Society of Scotland, has also suggested that is a corruption of ('slope'), which would lend a translation of little cairn of the slope.