<Tr> <Th> Settlements </Th> <Td> Thunder Bay, Ontario Duluth, Minnesota Sault Ste . Marie, Ontario Marquette, Michigan Superior, Wisconsin Sault Ste . Marie, Michigan </Td> </Tr> <Tr> <Td_colspan="2"> Shore length is not a well - defined measure . </Td> </Tr> <P> Lake Superior is the largest of the Great Lakes of North America . The lake is shared by the Canadian province of Ontario to the north, the US state of Minnesota to the west, and Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to the south . It is generally considered the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area . It is the world's third - largest freshwater lake by volume and the largest by volume in North America . The furthest north and west of the Great Lakes chain, Superior has the highest elevation and drains into the St. Mary's River . </P> <P> The Ojibwe call the lake gichi - gami (pronounced as gitchi - gami and kitchi - gami in other dialects), meaning "be a great sea ." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the name as "Gitche Gumee" in The Song of Hiawatha, as did Gordon Lightfoot in his song, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald". According to other sources, the actual Ojibwe name is Ojibwe Gichigami ("Ojibwe's Great Sea") or Anishinaabe Gichigami ("Anishinaabe's Great Sea"). The 1878 dictionary by Father Frederic Baraga, the first one written for the Ojibway language, gives the Ojibwe name as Otchipwe - kitchi - gami (reflecting Ojibwe Gichigami). The first French explorers approaching the great inland sea by way of the Ottawa River and Lake Huron during the 17th century referred to their discovery as le lac supérieur . Properly translated, the expression means "Upper Lake," that is, the lake above Lake Huron . The lake was also called Lac Tracy (named for Alexandre de Prouville de Tracy) by 17th century Jesuit missionaries . The British, upon taking control of the region from the French in the 1760s following the French and Indian War, anglicized the lake's name to Superior, "on account of its being superior in magnitude to any of the lakes on that vast continent ." </P>

Is lake superior the second largest lake in the world