Placenames in Britain Quiz | Etymology

Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts

1. The Viking word -by is still very frequent in Scandinavia. It means farm, and, by extension, village. Because of the presence of the Danes it's also very common in Britain. Which of these names may have originated from the idea of a farm in an area of "a certain type of animals"?

Answer: Derby

Derby = deer-farm or farm near deer.

Rug-by: has been explained as deriving from Rock-by (farm on a rock) because of the Domesday Book form: Roche-berie. On second thoughts, that is not a very likely origin. The real meaning of Roche-berie seems to have been "Hroca's fortified place", Hroca being a personal name, and berie deriving from Old English "burg" (fort).

Crosby: village with a cross. Selby: village by the 'sele', which means willows. Kirkby = farm near a kirk. Or village with a kirk. Whitby = white farm. Other 'by'-names: Corby (from Kori's village); Grimsby (Grim's village). A 'fake' 'by'- name is Tenby, which only looks as if it were a Viking name, but actually developed from Welsh din + bych which means little fort, and is identical to Denbigh.)

2. A popular ending for placenames in Britain is 'bury' which means 'borough' from Anglosaxon 'burh' or fortified place. Examples: Glastonbury, Shaftesbury and Salisbury, which is actually a mispronunciation of what earlier name?

Answer: Sarisbury

As all who visited Old Sarum will know, the original city had a different location.The Romans called the city Sorviodunum. The Anglo-Saxons renamed it Searu-burgh, in which burgh translates the Latin dunum, a fortification. In the Domesday Book it is recorded as Sarisberie. Normans had some problems with the pronunciation of an R and made an L of it, more or less in the same way as when some Asians turn 'rice' into 'lice' or French 'riz' into 'du lit'.

3. 'Bury' was also spelled 'borough', which led to confusion with another word that had developed from Anglo-Saxon 'beorg' as in German berg, gebirge or Dutch berg, gebergte, words which all refer to which local feature?

Answer: a hill or a mountain

The confusion between 'burh' (fortification) and 'beorg' (hill) is understandable because, in both cases, there can be a link with the idea of storing away as in AS 'beorgan'. Indeed, hills were used to 'store away' corpses in protected places. And a 'burh', too, was a hiding place where you were stored away in safety.

It's not always easy to find out which meaning of 'borough' is actually used in names such as Scarborough, Middlesbrough, Peterborough, Gainsborough, Edinburgh.

4. Much easier to identify is the meaning of -chester, -cester or -caster in placenames such as Dorchester, Cirencester, Doncaster. These endings all point to the presence of which of these?

Answer: a Roman camp

Other examples include Chichester, Colchester, Gloucester, Worcester, Bicester, Tadcaster.

5. There are plenty of -ford names in Britain. What did the ending -ford point to?

Answer: place where you can wade through a river

Examples include Long Melford, Bedford, Bradford and Hungerford. In Dutch, a ford is 'een voorde', and occurs in place names such as Bosvoorde, or surnames such as Vandevoorde. (Henk Vandevoorde = Henry Ford).

6. One of the most current endings is -ham, sometimes in combination with -ton as e.g. -hampton. What does -ham stand for?

Answer: home

Examples include Lavenham, Grantham, Birmingham, Wrexham, Hexham, Southampton and Northampton. Ton is related to German 'Zaun', a fence, and Dutch 'tuin', a fenced-in garden. 'Ton' meant that a particular place was protected by a fence. City-walls were a later prerogative of the wealthier places only, and permission to erect them had to be obtained via a charter.

7. Another easy-to-read ending is -minster, as in Axminster, Westminster, Leominster, Warminster, Ilminster and Kidderminster. What does it refer to?

Answer: presence of monks

The root word is 'monasterium'. This Latin word led to such placenames as Muenster in Germany or Munsterbilzen, Ingelmunster, Waasmunster in Belgium, etc. In English there was a vowel shift from 'o' or 'u' to 'i'. This vowel shift occurs in names such as the York Minster but also in less well-known words such as 'minchin' for a female monk, for example, the nuns belonging to the Order of St. Benedict who devote their lives to prayer and study.

8. Another very frequent ending is -leigh or -ley from 'leah' a clearing in a wood. Often the placename then points to the function of such a clearing. An easy one is Shipley. What was the 'leah' used for in this case?

Answer: sheep pasture

Other 'ley' or 'leigh' words include Buckley (not from bucks = dollars or bucks = rams, but from beech trees: a clearing in a beechwood area), Oakley (same, but an oakwood area) and Bromley (forest clearing where broom grows), as well as Barnsley, Eastleigh, Ripley and Dudley.

Sometimes the 'ley'-ending is based on a misunderstanding. An example of this is Beverley. Originally, this was 'bever lec', which means beaver stream. In popular perception it became -ley, an incorrect interpretation because normally beavers are not to be found in a woodclearing.

9. There are many '-wich' and '-wick' words in English. No link with witches however. 'Wic' simply means village or town from Latin vicus. A funny case is Droitwich which in late ninth century was still called Saltwich. What did the present name develop from?

Answer: dirt village

The Latin name was Salinae, which points to the early presence of salt mines. Somehow the place became rather muddy and a new name was given: 'muddy place where there are salt works'. Other -wich and -wick names are Norwich, Ipswich, Barnoldswick and Keswick (cheese-farm!).

10. Some frequent endings of placenames are very transparent, such as port, field, kirk and church. Many others are very opaque, including -worth for an enclosure, as in Petworth; -thwaite, which means the same as -leah, a clearing in a wood; -thorpe, just as '-by' meaning a farm and by extension a village. Easier to decode is -mere as in Grasmere, Ellesmere, Haslemere. What does it stand for?

Answer: lake

The general meaning of 'mere' in Germanic languages is a (large) body of water. Sometimes this becomes 'the sea' as in German, in other cases it's a smaller body of water as in Dutch ('Ijsselmeer het Merengebied' is Dutch for the Lake District.) Funnily enough, German 'See' then also got the meaning of lake as in Bodensee and Genfer See.

Source: Author flem-ish

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Placenames in Britain Trivia Quiz

With just a little bit of basic background knowledge, the place names on a map of Britain become suddenly so transparent. This quiz invites you to decode some of the more common 'etymologies'.

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