What’s in a Name? Exploring the Oxford Dictionary of British Place-Names

Have you ever wondered why the place where you live has its particular name? 

Why so many English towns end in -ton, -ham, -bury or -ford? 

Or why some British place names appear to bear very little resemblance to the way they are pronounced?

If so, A. D. Mills’ A Dictionary of British Place-Names, published by Oxford University Press, is the sort of reference book in which you can easily lose an entire afternoon.

And we mean that as a compliment.

Place names are miniature pieces of history. Long after buildings have disappeared, boundaries have shifted and languages have changed, the names can preserve clues about the people who once lived there and the landscape they knew.

Mills draws upon linguistic and historical research to explain the origins and development of thousands of place names across Britain. Celtic languages, Old English, Old Norse, Norman French and other influences all make appearances, reflecting successive chapters in British history.

One of the pleasures of the book is discovering just how descriptive many familiar names originally were. Elements referring to farms, settlements, rivers, hills, valleys, woods, bridges and fortified places occur again and again.

But centuries of pronunciation and spelling changes can disguise those origins almost beyond recognition.

For anyone interested in local history, genealogy, archaeology or British history, this makes the dictionary a particularly useful companion. If you're researching where an ancestor lived, for example, understanding the origin of the village name can sometimes tell you something about the landscape and history of the settlement itself.

It's also tremendous fun simply to browse.

Open it at random and you're likely to find yourself travelling around Britain without leaving your armchair. One entry leads to another, and before long a quick check of a single town has turned into half an hour investigating neighbouring villages.

For writers, there's another attraction. Place names help create a sense of landscape and history, and understanding how genuine British names developed can be invaluable when creating believable fictional towns and villages.

Here at That's Books and More, we have a particular fondness for reference books that aren't merely consulted but actually encourage exploration. A Dictionary of British Place-Names certainly falls into that category.

It reminds us that the names on road signs and railway stations aren't simply labels.

They're fragments of history that we use every day.

And once you start discovering what they mean, you may never look at a British map in quite the same way again.