What's in a Name
Place Names
Place-names, those familiar but often curious labels for places that feature
in all their rich diversity on map and signpost, fulfil such an essential function
in our daily lives that we take them very much for granted. Yet English place-names
are as much part of England’s cultural heritage as the English language and
the English landscape from which they spring, and almost every place-name has
an older original meaning behind its modern form.
Most people will have wondered at some time or other about the original meaning
of a place-name – the name of their home town or of the other familiar places
encountered en route to work by road or rail, the names of stations and
destinations and those seen on roadsigns and signposts, and the more unusual
names discovered on trips into the countryside or on holiday. Why Eccles, Stoke
Poges, Great Snoring, or Leighton Buzzard? What is the meaning of a name like
Strangeways or Chiswick? How did Croydon, Liverpool, and Windsor get their names?
What does Crick or Bootle mean?
In fact all these names have original meanings that are
not at all apparent from their modern forms. That is because most place-names
today are what could be termed ‘linguistic fossils’. Although they originated
as living units of speech, coined by our distant ancestors as descriptions of
places in terms and their topography, appearance, situation, use, ownership,
or other association, most have become, in the course of time, mere labels,
no longer possessing a clear linguistic meaning. This is perhaps not surprising
when one considers that most place-names are a thousand years old or more, and
are expressed in vocabulary that might have evolved differently from the equivalent
words in the ordinary language, or that may now be completely extinct or obscure.
Of course some place-names, even very old ones, have
apparently changed very little through the many centuries of their existence,
and may still convey something of their original meaning when the words from
which they are composed have survived in the ordinary language (even though
the features to which they refer may have changed or disappeared). Names such
as Claybrooke, Horseheath, Marshwood, Nettlebed, Oxford, Saltmarshe, Sandford,
and Woodbridge are shown by their early spellings to be virtually self-explanatory,
having undergone little or no change in form or spelling over a very long period.
But even a casual glance at a list of English place-names
will show that such instant etymologies are usually a delusion. The modern form
of a name can never be assumed to convey its original meaning without early
spellings to confirm it, and indeed many names that look equally obvious and
easy to interpret prove to have quite unexpected meanings in the light of the
evidence of early records. Thus Easter is ‘the sheep-fold’, Slaughter ‘the muddy
place’, Swine ‘the creek or channel’, and Wool ‘the spring or springs’ – the
inevitable association of such names with well-known words in the ordinary vocabulary
in understandable but quite misleading, for they all derive from old words which
survive in fossilized form in place-names but which are no longer found in the
language.
Names can never be taken at their face value, but can
only be correctly interpreted after the careful scrutiny of the earliest attested
spellings in the light of the dialectal development of the sounds of the language,
after wide comparisons have been made with similar or identical names, and after
other linguistic, historical, and geographical factors have been taken into
account. These fundamental principles of place-name etymology are most clearly
illustrated by the names which now have identical forms but which prove to have
quite distinct origins: for example, the name Broughton occurs several times
but has no less than three different origins (‘brook farmstead’, ‘hill farmstead’,
and ‘fortified farmstead’), the various places called Hinton fall into two distinct
groups (‘high farmstead’ or ‘farmstead belonging to a religious community’),
and even a place-name like Ashford can be deceptive and means something other
than ‘ash-tree ford’ in two instances. On the other hand, names now with different
spellings can turn out to have identical origins: thus Aldermaston and Alderminster
are both ‘nobleman’s farmstead’, Chiswick and Keswick are both ‘cheese farm’,
Hatfield and Heathfield are both ‘healthy open land’, and Naunton, Newington,
Newnton, Newton and Niton are all ‘new farmstead’. It goes without saying that
guesswork on the basis of a modern form is of little use, and that each name
must be the subject of individual scrutiny. For the same reason it should be
remembered that the interpretation offered for a particular name in the list
may not apply to another name with identical modern spelling occurring elsewhere,
which might well have a quite different origin and meaning on the evidence of
its early spellings and of other information.
All English place-names, whether of Celtic, Old English,
or Scandinavian origin, can be divided into three main groups:
Folk Names
Habitative Names
Topographic Names
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