Placing a name

Have you ever noticed how the same parts of place names seem to come up over and again? It turns out that most places were named after local geographical features, such as clearings, fords, rivers and so all those that came from the same local language share the same parts to their names.

For example, fording places of rivers often have names ending in “ford”, and many settlements were founded around local forwarding places because they were necessary for travel and trade. Similarly, “thwaite” comes from the Old Norse word for “clearing”. “Cam” and “Ox” both mean “river” in different tribal dialects, so Cambridge and Oxford signified fording places for their local rivers. This is part of what makes the distribution of different place names so interesting, because it tracks the spread of different old English dialects.

From maps to place names and back again

A collaborative linguistic mapping project that ran from September 2016 to January 2018, involving a number of organisations, including the GB Historical GIS Project based in our own Department of Geography, has produced a novel tool that allows anyone to enter a placename and find the distribution of places with that name on a map of Britain.

The National Library of Scotland has now re-released this tool online as the OS 1900 text search viewer that allows you to search and view the distribution of any text as a dot distribution map, including features and names. If you are a map enthusiast, you might be interested that the data comes from the Ordnance Survey six-inch to the mile, 2nd edition maps (1888-1913) of England, Scotland and Wales. (Our Map Librarian made me put that bit in!)

Have a play

Visit the OS 1900 text search viewer. Enter a place name or a common part of a place name (ford, wold, thwaite, hampton, bridge, ton, ham, ley…) and see how they are distributed across the country.

Help on using the viewer together with information on how it works and downloadable datasets are available from the National Library of Scotland.

Notice any interesting patterns? Spot any rare and unusual placenames? Let us know in the comments!