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 historic 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 2007 it had published 82 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. The Survey has been consistently supported, morally and practically, by the British Academy, and is currently (2005-10) supported by a large grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

[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 of Onomastic Sciences
• Rude Britain, a book of selected British toponymy

[edit] External links

• University of Nottingham Institute for Name-Studies official website
• Bibliographic data on survey volumes