A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
hydronym
A hydronym is the name of a body of water: a river, a lake, a spring, a stretch of sea. It is a category worth having its own word because water names behave differently from every other kind of place name. They are the most conservative words on any map and routinely survive the arrival of a new language when the names of the settlements around them are entirely replaced.
Etymology
The word is built from the Greek for water and the Greek for name, and it belongs to a family made the same way. A toponym is any place name, an oronym is the name of a mountain, an endonym is what a place calls itself, and an exonym is what outsiders call it.
Notes
Because they last, hydronyms are used as evidence for who was in a landscape before the record begins. Many English river names are not English: the Thames, the Severn, the Trent, the Avon, and the Ouse are all older than English and several are older than any language anyone can identify. Avon is simply the Celtic word for river.