Vocabulary
Search vocabulary database for place-name elements
The Vocabulary is an alphabetically-arranged dictionary of the words that make up England’s place‑names. These words—or place‑name elements—reflect the rich diversity of England’s linguistic history and derive from Norse, French, British Celtic, Irish and Latin, as well as from English in its various stages of development. The Vocabulary is a contribution to the historical study of all those languages. Its material is also of great interest to many historians, geographers and archaeologists concerned with the landscape, settlement and society of England over many centuries.
The Vocabulary aims to take the place of A.H. Smith’s English Place‑Name Elements, published by the EPNS in two volumes in 1956, which itself replaced Allen Mawer’s Chief Elements used in English Place‑Names of 1924. Periodic revision in this way is valuable because it takes account of the masses of new material published in the Survey of English Place‑Names, and also of the decades of new research published by editors of the Survey and by many other scholars. The Vocabulary offers not only a thorough revision of Smith’s work, but also a considerable enlargement of its scope to include much material from ‘minor’ names (field-names, street-names, etc.). The intention is to record all vocabulary found in any place‑name recorded before c.1750.
Publications:
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The Vocabulary of English Place‑Names: Á–Box (David N. Parsons and Tania Styles, with Carole Hough) 1997.
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The Vocabulary of English Place‑Names: Brace–Cæster (David N. Parsons and Tania Styles) 2000.
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The Vocabulary of English Place‑Names: Ceafor–Cock-pit (David N. Parsons) 2004.
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Volumes on Co–D, M–O and P–R are in preparation.
Free Download of the Draft Version of M entries [pdf]
How to order
Support for this project from the British Academy and the AHRC is gratefully acknowledged.
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