Sasmuan

Sasmuan is a fourth class municipality in the province of Pampanga, Philippines. According to the 2010 census, it has a population of 27,254 people.GeographySasmuan is located in the southern part of Pampanga. It is one of the three towns in the province touching the Manila Bay (Others are Macabebe and Lubao). It is bounded to the north by the municipalities of Guagua and Minalin; to the east by the municipality of Macabebe; to the west by the municipality of Lubao; and to the south by Manila Bay.EtymologyThe town's former name of "Sexmoan" was how it was spelled by Spanish friars attempting to transcribe "Sasmuan". In Spanish, the letter can be pronounced as a voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/, identical to the digraph in English. It was derived from the ancient Kapampangan rootword sasmo, which means to meet, according to a 17th-century Kapampangan dictionary. Sasmoan therefore is synonymous with "pitagmuan" or "meeting place of the datus" or "meeting point". It was named "Sasmuan" because it is where the Pampangos meet when they were at war with the Chinese in Guagua. In 1991, it was unanimously changed into Sasmuan, since the previous name, Sexmoan, denoted a very negative sexual connotation not only to the town, but also to the people living within the town itself due to the inculture of believing that the prefix "Sex-" had something to do with the English word sex.