Every town, village and hamlet in Britain and Ireland, and every Irish townland, 105,532 names in all, sorted by the old words hidden inside them. One map for the English, the Vikings, the Romans, the Welsh, the Cornish and the Gaels.
Place names are the oldest documents most of us read every day. Bradford, Grimsby, Lancaster, Llandudno, Pitlochry and Ballymena each carry a word from a language that named the place: Old English, Old Norse, Latin, Welsh, Pictish, Gaelic. Scholars have studied these words for well over a century, county by county. What is harder to see is the whole picture at once, across both islands, from the same open data.
So I took every settlement in the Ordnance Survey's open gazetteer of Great Britain, Northern Ireland's official place names and townlands, and the Republic of Ireland's official gazetteer of towns and townlands, and tagged each name with 67 spelling rules: endings such as -ton, -by and -chester, and beginnings such as llan-, aber-, tre-, pit-, inver- and bally-. The map shows where each word lives. Search for your own town to see what its name is made of.
43% of all settlements, and 44% of Irish townlands, carry at least one element on my list. The rest have names my rules do not cover (Newport, Church End, Felindre, Mount Pleasant) or newer names. Here is the share of each nation's settlements with an element from each language family.
England is English: 41% of its settlements carry an English element, against 4.2% with a Norse one. Wales splits: 28% of its settlements have a Welsh (Brittonic) element and 8% an English one. Scotland is the most mixed, with Gaelic (13%) and English (13%) about level and Norse strong in the Northern Isles. In Ireland, Gaelic dominates: 38% of townlands in the Republic and 44% in Northern Ireland start with a Gaelic element on my list.
On the map, of the 976 squares with at least three tagged settlements, English is the leading family in 591, Gaelic in 251, Brittonic in 91 and Norse in 43.
The single commonest element is the Old English tūn, a farmstead or estate that later became a village: 5,949 settlements end in -ton, 16% of all those in England. Behind it come -ley, a woodland clearing (1,902), -ing (1,724), -ham (1,251), -ford (1,020) and -field (819).
Some elements are big-town words. The Old English ceaster, borrowed from Latin castra and used for a Roman fort or town, sits in 67 settlement names, and 33% of them are towns or cities in Ordnance Survey's terms (Manchester, Lancaster, Doncaster, Chester), against 3.3% of all settlements in Great Britain. Others are hamlet words: 50% of tre- names and 49% of -cote names are hamlets.
This fits the usual reading, that ceaster names often mark Roman forts and towns, many of which stayed important; the data show the link, not the reason. The English -bury (burh, a fortified place) and the river-mouth words aber- and inver- also lean towards towns.
Norse elements are rarer than English ones but tightly packed. 719 settlements end in -by (Old Norse bý, a farmstead), 389 in -thorpe, 85 in -thwaite. In Lincolnshire 33% of settlements have a Norse element; across England, 4.2%. In Shetland (25%) and Orkney (18%) the Norse words are of another kind: -setter and -bister (a farm or dwelling) and -wick from vík, a bay.
The line between the -bys and the rest has been mapped many times, and my earlier study Beck, brook or burn? compares it with the old Danelaw boundary, so I do not repeat that here.
Welsh elements (llan-, pen-, aber-, tre-, cwm, bryn, nant, rhyd, maes, pont, caer, betws) mark 30% of the settlements in Wales. Llan-, a church enclosure, is the commonest, in 384 names. To see how sharply they stop, I measured every settlement's distance from the land border between England and Wales and applied the Welsh rules on both sides.
The change is sharp but not a cliff. Between 20 and 40 km inside Wales, 31% of settlements have a Welsh element; the same distance inside England, 0.5%. In the 5 km either side of the line the shares are 15% on the Welsh side and 7% on the English side. 73 English settlements within 60 km have Welsh spellings, from Llanyblodwel and Llanfair Waterdine in Shropshire to Pontrilas and Llangrove in Herefordshire, borderlands where Welsh was spoken for centuries after the border was drawn. English elements fade the other way: 19% of settlements just inside Wales, and 5% deeper in.
"By Tre, Pol and Pen shall ye know the Cornishmen", runs the old rhyme. Cornwall's farms and coves are named in Cornish: 183 settlements start with tre- (a farmstead), more with pol- (a pool or cove), pen- (a headland), porth- (a cove), bos- (a dwelling), lan- and ros-. Together they mark 27% of Cornwall's settlements. In Devon, with the same rules, 1.4%, and most of those are false friends such as Rosemary Lane and Pennymoor.
The drop at the Tamar is abrupt. Within Cornwall, the share falls only gently eastwards, from 26% west of 5 degrees to 21% in the east of the county.
Scotland has two words for a river mouth or confluence. Aber- is Brittonic, the language of the Britons and, in the north east, the Picts; inver- is Gaelic. On my count Scotland has 22 aber- settlements and 54 inver- ones. 20 of the abers lie east of 4 degrees west, in Perth and Kinross, Fife and Aberdeenshire; the invers spread west and north, 19 of them in Highland.
Pit-, from the Pictish pett, a portion of land, is the clearest Pictish trace on the modern map: 25 settlements, 21 of them east of 4 degrees west, in Fife, Aberdeenshire and Perth and Kinross (Pitlochry, Pittenweem, Pitmedden). Many pit- names join the Pictish word to a Gaelic one, a sign of the Gaelic speakers who took over the Pictish lands.
Ireland's place names live in its townlands, about 59,900 small land units, each with its own name. In the Republic, the official gazetteer gives an Irish form for 35,223 of them, the forms researched by the state's Placenames Branch. That allows something a spelling map cannot usually do: check what an English spelling really stands for.
Bally- (and Balli-, Bal-) is the commonest beginning, in 6,282 townlands, 10% of the total. Its Irish form is usually baile, a homestead or settlement: 90% of Bally- names with an Irish form begin with Baile. But 184 begin with Béal, as in Béal Átha, the mouth of a ford (Ballina, Ballinasloe), and 99 with Bealach, a pass or road.
Kil- is a church only about two times in three. In 30% of cases with an Irish form, it is coill, a wood.
Of 2,120 Kil- names with an Irish form, 1,448 begin with Cill (a church or monastic cell) and 629 with Coill or its forms (wood). Wood names cluster: among townlands, coill accounts for 95 of 105 Kil- names in Monaghan, 35 of 42 in Cavan and 51 of 67 in Leitrim, but only 7 of 78 in Kilkenny. Dun- is usually dún, a fort, but 35 of 271 are domhnach, a church (Donaghmore). Agha- is usually achadh, a field, but 75 of 331 are áth, a ford. Most other elements are what they seem: Knock- is cnoc, a hill, 99% of the time, Drum- is droim, a ridge, 99%, and Lis- is lios, a ringfort, 98%.
Where Bally- lives is a story of its own. In Ards and North Down, 48% of townlands start with Bally-; in Wexford, 21%. In Leitrim, Monaghan, Cavan and Fermanagh and Omagh, under 2% do; townland names there start with Drum-, Kil-, Lis-, Derry- and Tully- instead. In Meath, 35% of townlands end in -town (Faganstown, Pagestown and Warrenstown are typical), as do 26% in Dublin and 25% in Kildare: the English-speaking Pale of the Middle Ages.
Names. Great Britain: the 43,274 populated places in OS Open Names (cities, towns, villages, hamlets, suburban areas and other settlements), with their Welsh or Gaelic forms where Ordnance Survey gives one. Northern Ireland: the 336 towns and villages in the OSNI Open Data gazetteer, and 9,520 townlands from OSNI's townland boundaries. Republic of Ireland: the 2,022 centres of population and 50,380 townlands in Tailte Éireann's National Placenames Gazetteer, with their official Irish forms. Townlands are land units, not settlements, so they are counted separately.
Rules. Each name is split into words (Upper, Little, North, Saint and similar words are dropped), and each word is tested against 67 spelling rules. Endings must have at least two letters in front (so Ton alone does not count); some beginnings are only tested where the language was spoken, so that Balham and Kilburn in London are not counted as Gaelic, and Kirk- counts as Norse only in England. A name can carry several elements: Birmingham has -ing and -ham. The meaning shown for each element is the standard reading in the place-name literature; where one spelling covers several words, the text says so.
Checks. During the analysis, random samples of 20 matches for each of 14 common elements (280 names) were read through for plain false friends, such as Tucking Mill caught by -ing or Duncanstone by dun-: 9 were found, so about 97% of matches fit the element's spelling as intended. This checks the rules, not the history: a name can pass and still have a different origin. For Ireland the official Irish forms give a real test of meaning, shown in section 08.
Limits. The datasets differ. Great Britain's list goes down to hamlets; the Irish town lists hold only larger places, which is why the townland layer matters there. Modern spellings can hide an element or fake one, and new names (Newtown, Mount Pleasant) are counted as English. Grid squares are equal steps of latitude and longitude, so squares in the north are a little smaller. Nothing here dates a name: an element shows which language shaped the name, not when the place was founded.
Every name with its tags, the counts by area and by grid square, the Irish-form check, the rules and the code are in the GitHub repository and archived with the paper at doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23761433.
Related: Beck, brook or burn? on the words for streams, valleys and hills and the Danelaw line; Bloody place names on Battle, Slaughter and Gallows; High Street or Main Street? on street names.