British place-name elements

Celtic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon and Norse layers

Toponymy — reading the map as history

The endings of British settlement names record who settled where. Latin castra, a camp, survives in every Chester, cester and caster; Old English tūn, hām and lēah account for the great bulk of English villages; Old Norse býr, thorp and thveit map the Danelaw almost exactly; and the Celtic languages contribute llan, tre, caer, pen, aber, inver, kil and bally across Wales, Cornwall, Scotland and Ireland. Because successive settlers borrowed names they did not understand, some places end up saying the same thing three times over.

How to spot them

▸A -by or a -thorpe means Scandinavian settlement
▸Anything with -chester, -cester or -caster was a Roman camp
▸Aber and inver both mean a river mouth; one is Welsh, one Gaelic
▸Tautologies: hills whose names mean hill-hill-hill

Key facts

Endings in -by, -thorpe and -thwaite map the area of Scandinavian settlement almost exactly

Old Norse býr (farm or village), þorp (secondary settlement) and þveit (clearing) — Whitby, Scunthorpe, Bassenthwaite

Chester, Cirencester and Doncaster all preserve the Latin word for a camp

Castra, borrowed into Old English as ceaster

Old English lēah, a clearing in woodland, gives one of the commonest endings on the map

-ley and -leigh, as in Barnsley, Dudley, Leigh

Llan is a church enclosure, tre a farmstead and caer a fort

Welsh and Cornish elements: Llandudno, Tredegar, Caernarfon

Two words for a river mouth, one Welsh and one Gaelic, divide Britain between them

Aber (Aberdeen, Aberystwyth) and inver (Inverness, Inveraray)

A Cumbrian hill whose name stacks three words all meaning hill, in three different languages

Torpenhow — Brittonic tor, Brittonic pen, Old Norse haugr

Nantwich, Droitwich and Northwich share an ending that here marks an industry, not a farm

The -wich of the salt towns; elsewhere wic means a trading settlement, as in Ipswich

Kirkby, Ormskirk and Kirkcudbright all carry the Norse word for a church

Kirkja; Kirkcudbright is the church of St Cuthbert

Key ideas

Place-names are dated by their earliest recorded spellings, not by how they look now. Only early forms can tell whether a -ham is Old English hām, a homestead, or hamm, a river meadow or enclosure — the two have fallen together in modern spelling.

Quick-fire facts

•Old English tūn, a farmstead or enclosure, is the commonest English settlement ending, giving -ton
•The suffix -ing or -ingas means 'the people of': Hastings is Hæsta's people, Reading is Reada's
•Old English burh, a fortified place, gives -bury, -burgh and -brough
•Old English dūn is a hill (-don), feld open land (-field), hyrst a wooded hill (-hurst) and worth an enclosure
•There are roughly 600 place-names in -by in England, concentrated in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Leicestershire
•Scottish elements include kil- (a church cell), bal- (a settlement), dun- (a fort), strath- (a broad valley) and glen-
•Irish elements include bally- (baile, a settlement), kil-, knock- (a hill), lis- and dun-
•Avon simply means 'river' and Ouse means 'water', so the River Avon is the river river
•Pendle Hill in Lancashire means hill-hill-hill, from Cumbric pen, Old English hyll and the modern word
•The English Place-Name Society, founded in 1923, has been publishing county-by-county surveys ever since

Drill it — 8 cards

1 / 8new card

Sources

Eilert Ekwall — The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names
Victor Watts — The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names