Speaking of Words
By MICHAEL FERBER
The majority of city and town names in New Hampshire come from British placenames (mainly English), but many of these placenames have mysterious origins. Chichester, Dorchester, Lancaster, Manchester, Rochester, and Winchester, for example, all end with the Roman word for a military camp or fort, castra, but what about the first syllables?
Chichester (in Sussex) seems to be based on the personal name Cissa, who is named in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as one of the sons of Aelle, the first king of the South Saxons (“South Saxons” is the source of “Sussex”), but historians doubt this story because there is no evidence that the Roman fort was reoccupied during the time of Cissa or for a long time afterward. So the name remains a puzzle. Its pronunciation is clear, however: the first syllable has a short i, as in “itch,” unlike its namesake in New Hampshire.
The opening syllables of the five other cities and towns all seem to go back to British words, that is, to the Celtic language or languages spoken by the Britons at the time the Romans invaded, long before the English-speaking Angles and Saxons arrived. (Welsh is the main descendant of ancient British.) The dor- in Dorchester comes from the Roman name Durnovaria, which seems to have the British word durn in it, which means “fist”; its second element may be from gwarae, which means “play.” “Fist-play” seems an unlikely placename, but maybe it has something to do with a sports arena in the town, where men held boxing matches. Or “fist” could refer to pebbly stones, fist-sized. Another puzzle.
The lan– in Lancaster may be a British river name, the meaning of which is unknown. The man– in Manchester comes from the Roman name for the place, Mamucium, but nobody knows what the (probably British) first syllable means. The ro– in Rochester goes back to the name Durobrivis, a Latin spelling of a British word that seems to mean “bridges of the stronghold.” The win- in Winchester is derived from the British name of the town, Wenta (Latin Venta), which may mean “meeting place,” or it may mean “white place” for the chalk it is built upon, or it may mean something else.
All this is rather disappointing, but we are two thousand years away from the Roman-British names, and Welsh is only of marginal help, so it is not surprising that there is little consensus about them.
How about London? You would think linguists had figured out that name by now. Well, the Romans called it Londinium or Lundinium, which may come directly from a British name like Londonion, but the lond– part is obscure. One theory is that the name means “the place of Londinos,” whose name means “the bold one.” Another is that it has the same origin as Lyons in France: Lugdunum, which is Gaulish for “fort of Lugus (the god).” (Gaulish was a Celtic language fairly close to British.) Once again, there is no certainty here.
We might have better luck with names from Old English (or Anglo-Saxon). Names ending in –ham, such as Chatham, Durham, Nottingham, Stratham, and Windham, usually bear the Old English word that meant “settlement” and evolved into modern English “home.” We see a kindred pattern in German-speaking lands, which have places such as Mannheim, Friedheim, and Pforzheim. The chat– in Chatham, however, seems to come from the British word for “wood,” as in Welsh coed. The dur– in Durham may have arisen from a French pronunciation of dun, which means “hill”; the –ham may be a rewriting of holm, from holmr, an Old Norse word for “high rock.” (The Norse, or Danes, conquered half of England in 865 and stayed for more than two centuries.)
The not– in Nottingham was originally snot– (I’m not making this up), so the name means “the home of the people of Snot,” whoever he was. If you don’t like people in our Nottingham, now you know what to call them. The strat- in Stratham is transparent, for Old English straet was taken from Latin strata, “road,” short for via strata, “paved road”; the town was on a Roman road. From straet we get modern English “street.” As for Windham, it does not mean “home of the wind,” as we might have hoped. It is short for Wymondham, named after somebody named Wigmund or Wimund.
If castra gave rise to scores of English town names, in shortened form it may also appear in quite a few Welsh names: Caernarfon, Caerleon, and Cardiff, for instance. But it is more likely that caer– or car– comes from a native British word that meant “fort” or “enclosure.”
As for enclosures, many town names imply enclosure or walls, notably those ending in –ton, such as Hampton, Kingston, Milton, Boston, and many more. The ending -ton is a reduced form of “town,” which used to mean “enclosure” or “yard.” The Old English word was identical to Old Frisian and Old Dutch tun (with a long u), which meant “fence” or “hedge’: modern German Zaun means “fence.” It is also related to Gaulish dunon and Old Irish dun, both meaning “fort,” especially “hill fort.” As “hill,” dun gave rise to our words “dune” and “down,” as in “The North Downs” and “The South Downs” in southwest England. When we say “downtown,” then, we are almost punning.
A few English towns end in -wick or –wich, which used to stand by itself to mean “town” or “village”: Keswick, Southwick, Ipswich, Sandwich, etc. A similar word for “town, district, ward” is found in the other Germanic languages, but they seem to come from Latin vicus, with the same meaning, and from which we get our word “vicinity.” The root goes all the way back to Proto-Indo-European, whence Greek woikos, later oikos “household, estate, house,” whence our words “economy” and “ecology.” And the yogurt brand Oikos, pronounced eekos in Modern Greek.
But let’s end by noting the sheer charm, or silliness, of many English town names, whatever their origins: Barking, Bedlam Bottom, Biggleswade, Chipping Sodbury, Crackpot, Dorking, Flitwick, Giggleswick, Kidderminster, Knockerdown, Leighton Buzzard, Nether Wallop, Oundle, Shitterton, Spilsby, Splatt, and Tooting Bec. You would think they were invented by Charles Dickens or Monty Python, but they really exist. I plan to visit Giggleswick next time I’m in Yorkshire. There is a cave nearby worth visiting named Cave Ha (I’m not making this up). It should be fun.
I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.
Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San Francisco.