English placenames have often been a problem to students of English as they seem to have quite different rules for pronunciation and spelling. Many of them are made up of components that were fully meaningful in earlier periods of English but say little to us today; it is only when there is flooding, we remember Oxford and Stratford have fords on rivers. Here are some common components of English placenames with what are believed to be their sources, difficult as these are to unravel over 2000 years. Mostly these reflect the practice of the Anglo-Saxons in naming the new country they had invaded in about the 6th Century AD in what is now called Old English (OE). Sometimes they called the places by their Roman names; Colchester, Doncaster and Cirencester would have had Roman camps (castra). Sometimes they called places after the people who lived there Suffolk where the South Folk lived, Essex where the East Saxons dwelled, Goring where the people of Gor lived. Often they named it after natural features like Bournemouth (mouth of the stream) or Sheffield (open land by the river Sheaf).
-caster, -chester, -cester etc Lancaster, Doncaster, Chester, Manchester, Leicester.
From the OE ‘ceastra’ meaning a fortified place which in turn comes from the Latin ‘castra’ for military camp.
-ham Grantham, Witham, Streatham
From the Old English (OE) ‘ham’ meaning home; there is also an OE word ‘ham’ meaning an enclosed field, which underlies some
placenames.
-bourne/burn Bournemouth, Ouseburn, Southbourne
From the OE 'bourn/burn' meaning a small stream
-bury, -borough, -burgh, -brough Salisbury, Edinburgh, Canterbury, Middlesbrough
From OE 'burh' a fortified town or manor house
-don, -down Huntingdon, Swindon, Abingdon
From OE 'dun' a small hill
-field Heathfield, Sheffield
From OE 'feld' meaning open
land
-folk Suffolk, Norfolk
From OE 'folc' meaning people
-ford Oxford, Stratford, Brentford
From OE. 'ford'
river crossing
-hythe Hythe, Rotherhythe, Lambeth (Lamb-hythe)
From OE 'hyth' a small port often on a river
-ing, -ingas, -ingham Birmingham, Goring, Walsingham, Ealing
From OE 'inga' people. Sometimes the ending means ‘followers of’ (Beormund
etc); sometimes simply ‘people’. The difference between these seems too subtle for us
to appreciate now.
-lea, -leigh, -ly Burley,
Leigh-on-sea, Eastleigh, Osterly
From OE 'lea' wood or cultivated land.
-wich Middlewich, Nantwich, Sandwich
From OE 'díc' (ditch) (used for salt-mining towns where ditches were dug).
-shire Yorkshire, Lancashire, Perthshire
From OE 'scir' meaning an
administrative division of the country
-stead: Hampstead, Greenstead, Stansted, Steeple Bumpstead
From OE 'stede' inhabited place