The county and city name, Nowata, is derived from a Delaware Indian word, noweata, meaning "welcome". According to one story, two railway surveyors rented rooms from an educated Cherokee woman and asked her for possible station names for towns along the line. The woman suggested "Noweata". There are two stories of how the spelling changed; one is that the post office misspelled the name of the town in their official records; another story tells of how a drunken painter misspelled "Nowata" on the depot and the name stuck.