A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
975 entries
aber
A river mouth, or the confluence of two waters, and by extension the settlement that grows at one. It comes at the front of a place name rather than the end: Aberystwyth is the mouth of the Ystwyth, Aberdeen the mouth of the Dee, Aberdaron the mouth of the Daron.
Etymology
Common Brythonic, appearing in Old Welsh as oper and later aper, from a reconstructed *od-ber, “pouring away,” built on the Proto-Indo-European root *bher-, “to carry” — the same root behind English bear and Latin ferō. Its Goidelic counterpart is inbhir, anglicized as inver. The two words mean the same thing and divide the map between them: Aber runs through Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany; inver through Ireland and the Gaelic west; and both are scattered across eastern Scotland, where aber marks the old Pictish ground and inver the Gaelic that displaced it.