PLACE-NAME, also placename, place name. Technically toponym. The proper name of a locality, either natural (as of bodies of water, mountains, plains, and valleys) or social (as of cities, counties, provinces, nations, and states). In an island like Britain, settled by successive waves of peoples, the place-names embody its history. Celtic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, and Norman names vie with one another today as their name-givers did in past centuries. The elements that make up place-names reflect a polyglot heritage:
-coombe from Celtic *
kumbos (Welsh
cwm) for a hollow or small valley, as in
Cwmbrân and
Cwm Rhondda in Wales,
Coombe and
High Wycombe in southern England, and
Cumloden and
Cumwhitton in northern England. The variants
-chester appear in
Chester and
Manchester,
-caster in
Lancaster, and
-cester in
Cirencester and
Gloucester, and come from Latin
castra (a military camp). Forms of the Old England
burh (dative case
byrig), a fortified settlement, appear in England as
-bury in
Canterbury,
-borough in
Scarborough, and
-brough in
Middlesbrough, and in Scotland as
-burgh, in
Edinburgh (with mainland European cognates in
Hamburg in Germany and
Skanderborg in Denmark). The Scandinavian
-by (a farm or village) can be found throughout northern and eastern England, in such names as
Derby,
Grimsby,
Romanby,
Walesby, and
Whitby.
In more recently settled English-speaking countries, names are often commemorative of places in the motherland, as with the city of
Boston in Massachusetts in the US (after the town in Lincolnshire in England) and the town of
Hamilton in Ontario, Canada (after the town near Glasgow in Scotland). They may also commemorate well-known people in the motherland or the new settlement: for example, the settlements and features called or incorporating the name of Queen Victoria in Cameroon (now Limbe), southern Africa, Canada, and Australia. Sometimes the names are simply descriptive, wherever they are found:
the Black Isle a peninsula in Scotland,
North Island in New Zealand, and
the Rocky Mountains in the US and Canada.
Some place-names have two or more elements: a generic for the kind of place and a specific for a particular locale. The generic usually comes last, as in
Atlantic Ocean,
British Isles,
Malvern Hills,
Madison Avenue,
New York City; sometimes, however, it comes first, as in
Cape St Vincent,
Mount Everest,
Lake Huron; and sometimes the elements are joined by
of, as in
Bay of Fundy,
Cape of Good Hope,
Gulf of Carpentaria. Some names which might be expected to have a generic lack one: for example,
the Matterhorn,
the Himalayas. In a few instances, British and American practice differs:
River Thames as against
Mississippi River;
County of Warwick and
Warwickshire as against
Clinton County, with
county used attributively in Ireland, as in
County Clare and
County Tyrone (and in the one instance of
County Durham in England). See place-name panels for
AMERICAN,
AUSTRALIAN,
CANADIAN,
ENGLISH,
IRISH,
NEW ZEALAND,
SCOTTISH,
SOUTH AFRICAN,
WELSH.
