British toponymy (relating to the mainland and islands closely linked to it including the Shetland Islands, the Orkneys, and the Channel Islands) is the study of place names, their origins and the trends associated with naming places in specific regional areas. It is different from the study of etymology, which is concerned mainly with the origin of the name of a specific place.
British toponymy is rich, complex and difficult. Moreover it is extremely inexact and non-empirical. Many British forms and names have been corrupted over the years through being occupied by many different groups of people speaking different languages with similar words meaning different things. In some cases words used in place names are derived from languages that are extinct, and of which there are no extant known definitions. There are also many compounds between two separate languages from separate periods.
The oldest and most ancient of place names tend to be rivers, and can be traced to Old European pre-Celtic languages (of which very little is known), and must be at least Neolithic in age. There are many other languages which have shaped and informed the nomenclature of Britain: various Celtic languages (including Brythonic, Gaelic, Scots Gaelic, Welsh, Cornish and Pictish), Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Norman French, modern French and a few others besides.
The Anglo-Saxons contributed elements such as ham, -ingas, -inga-, -eg, feld, ford, and dun. Scandinavian place names were commonest in the area covered by the Danelaw, but south of Watling Street place names were more British-Scandinavian hybrid.
The Romans added various elements such as Regis (of the King), Magna (great) and Parvo (little).
Sometimes, identifying the origins and meaning of a name it is easy. The modern form of the name may reflect its original meaning. A good example of this is Box Hill, Surrey which is exactly what it says it is: a hill upon which box once grew. Sometimes it isn't: Bedlam, Yorkshire has nothing to do with the lunatic asylum (Bedlam, from Bethlehem) of earlier times, but is a corruption of the Anglo-Saxon bodle lumm, "the place of the buildings".
'Back formation' is the process whereby modern names are given to rivers that had the original names forgotten, e.g. the River running through Rochdale became known as the Roch through this process.
The toponymy of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland are considered under a separate heading, Irish toponymy (see also: Place names in Irish}.
See also
References
- A Dictionary of English Place-Names, A. D. Mills, Oxford, 1991.
