Place Name Elements and What They Mean

How to read a place name

Most old place names are two words joined together. The first part says what was there: a tree, a colour, an animal, a person. The second part says what kind of place it was: a farm, a clearing, a ford, a fort. Ashford is "the river crossing by the ash trees", Grimsby is "Grímr's farm", and Inverness is "the mouth of the river Ness". Find the ending in the tables below and you can read most names on an English, Scottish or Irish map.

The tables are generated from the same word lists the generators use, so every element here can turn up in a village or town name, a street name, an island name or a kingdom name. Elven and Dwarven roots are invented, so they are left out, and so are the everyday woodland words of the Sylvan culture.

Sources

Each element links to one of these public-domain books, scanned on the Internet Archive. The meanings given are the standard dictionary senses, simplified to modern spelling. They are meant to help you choose and explain a name, not to settle the etymology of a particular real place, where local history can change the story.

• Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (1898): Old English elements such as tūn, hām, lēah, burh and wīc.
• Richard Cleasby and Gudbrand Vigfusson, An Icelandic-English Dictionary (1874): Old Norse elements such as býr, þorp, þveit, vík, holmr and ríki.
• P. W. Joyce, The Origin and History of Irish Names of Places (1869): Irish elements such as baile, cill, cnoc, lios, doire and inis.
• James B. Johnston, Place-Names of Scotland (1892): Gaelic elements such as inbhir, dùn, gleann, srath and achadh.
• Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (1879): Latin roots and endings.
• Isaac Taylor, Words and Places (1864): how place-name elements spread with settlers, Welsh elements and the Gallo-Latin endings -ācum and -ōna.
• Jacob Larwood and John Camden Hotten, The History of Signboards (1866): English inn signs and inn names.

Spotted a wrong meaning? Write to hello@mythnamer.com. More on how the names are built is on the about page.

Using the table

• Read your map. If a region already has real-sounding names, check their endings here and keep new names in the same language.
• Give a name a history. A town called Kirkby ("church farm") had a church before it had a market; a Newport was once a new market town or harbour.
• Mix languages on purpose. Norse endings in one valley and English ones in the next tell readers that two peoples settled the land.
• Print a list for the table. The d100 name tables turn any generator into a printable roll table.

You are welcome to quote or link this table in your own guides and worldbuilding notes. Please link back to this page.