English Place-Name Society

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The English Place-Name Society is a learned society based in England concerned with toponomastics, in other words, the study of place-names (toponyms). Its survey covers the 39 traditional counties of England. Its scholars aim to explain the origin and history of the names they study, taking into account the meaning of the elements out of which they were created (e.g. in a very early form of Welsh, Old English, early Danish or Norwegian or Cornish); the topography, geology and ecology of the places bearing the names; and the general and local history and culture of England.

The Society was founded in 1923, and since 1968 its offices have been based at the University of Nottingham. By 2005 it had published 81 volumes of the county-by-county Survey of English Place-Names, aimed mainly at scholarly and academic users, and a range of books and booklets on names organized by region or by category (e.g. field-names), as well as some county dictionaries aimed mainly at a non-specialist audience.

[edit] See also

Cameron, Kenneth, English place-names (new edition), Batsford (1996).
Watts, Victor, Cambridge dictionary of English place-names, Cambridge (2004).
British toponymy
Scottish Place-Name Society, Ulster Place-Name Society, Society for Name Studies in Britain and Ireland
International Council for Onomastic Sciences
Rude Britain, a book of selected British toponymy