A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1190 entries
toponym
A toponym is a place name, and toponymy is the study of them: where they came from, what they meant, and what they record. Place names are among the most durable things in a landscape and frequently outlast the language that made them, so a map is a stratified document with layers of different speakers on the same sheet.
Etymology
The word is Greek for place-name and it heads a family built the same way: a hydronym is the name of a body of water, an oronym the name of a mountain, an endonym what a place calls itself, an exonym what outsiders call it. The Greek root also gives topography, topical, and utopia, which is no-place.
Notes
Toponyms are evidence when nothing else survives. A district full of Norse elements marks Norse settlement, a scatter of British names in an English-speaking region marks who was there before, and the distribution of a single element like thwaite or -ley maps clearing patterns. Names attached to water are the most conservative of all, which is why so many English rivers carry words nobody can now translate.