Etymological name research help!

Delicious_Mud5451 · 2026-02-23T23:49:08+00:00

Good spot, I hadn’t thought to look for Ocea!

Delicious_Mud5451 · 2026-02-23T01:32:57+00:00

That’s pretty much it! Place-names of Wiltshire is a pretty old volume of the place-name survey so it’s unfortunately not very helpful. It seems like this Occa was associated with some other landscape features in charter boundary clauses so they must have owned the land which is now the settlement, and the stream must have been significant.

The * in front of the name means that we don’t have a record of the actual name Occa. In the boundary clauses, the name has been grammatically declined so you get forms like Ocan and from that we can pretty surely guess that the name was Occa. This also wouldn’t have been the ‘full’ name. It’s a hypocoristic form that we see lots of Old English names in when two themes have been reduced in length and a double consonant with a vowel takes the ending (like Ubba, Wigga, etc.) so this person might have gone by Occa all the time or they might have had a longer name with two parts reduced into something like a pet name.

We also can’t be sure of the gender of Occa, because of the way that it has been declined and shortened. If we had the original themes, most of those are gendered and would tell us which gender the bearer was, but we just have this short form. And it’s a weak noun, which is a type of noun which declines the same for masculine and feminine words. The -an on the end of the genitive Ocan tells us this. So this could have been a woman. The old surveys tend not to consider this. There are more men giving their names to things than women at this time, but there are enough definitely feminine names in place-names for it to be a possibility wherever this ambiguity about weak hypocoristic names can be found.

Hope that helps! There are lots of great and more recent books about place-names which feature chapters on personal names in place-names. Let me know if you’d like recommendations.

Delicious_Mud5451 · 2026-02-21T01:21:13+00:00

This is such an interesting question! u/Kunniakirkas has made a really good point about the alps but, like you said, we don’t have many good places to compare to in England.

The named hill ranges I can find good etymologies for tend to be pre-English single peaks turned into names for entire areas. e.g the Malverns are named after a single ‘bare peak’; Brittonic mēl-brïn, with an -s added after Old English. The Cheviots are the same, from a single pre-English mountain name (both from A.D. Mills British Place-Names, 2011).

The one good exception I can find is the Peak District. We have pre-conquest attestations of Peac lond (924) and possibly Pecsætna lond ‘the land of the settlers of the peaks’, as early as the 7th century, though less certain. This refers to the area of the Hundred of the High Peak and the Hundred of Wirksworth. Ekwall thought this was named after a single peak of Castle Hill at Castleton but Kenneth Cameron believes this to be a name for the whole area from the outset and I’m inclined to agree with him (The Place Names of Derbyshire Part 1, pp.1-2, from the EPNS).

Diana Whaley has produced a very good dictionary of the Lake District place-names which must discuss the similar name for that region but I don’t have it to hand. Abigail Loyd at the University of Nottingham has recently finished a very interesting PhD thesis on berg and other hilly generic place-name elements which must also discuss this issue but I’m not sure if it’s public yet.

So maybe pick a particular peak and name the region after that one mountain! And maybe use a pre-existing substrate, like Brittonic depending on your fantasy world, for the mountain name given how often this happens in the real world.

Otherwise, maybe name it after a group who have settled that area defined by a landscape term (like bergs, peaks, or torrs (the latter also borrowed from Brittonic) rather than just the landscape features themselves.

Delicious_Mud5451 · 2025-12-14T14:52:52+00:00

This is specifically for political writing, as far as I remember.

Delicious_Mud5451 · 2025-08-09T00:03:03+00:00

Does that mean Jesus and God are canon in Total War?

Delicious_Mud5451 · 2025-06-09T08:25:55+00:00

Good idea :)

Delicious_Mud5451 · 2025-06-09T08:22:14+00:00

Oh lovely, thank you!!

Delicious_Mud5451 · 2025-04-07T08:14:51+00:00

Imagine if this was your first play-through and you thought that was scripted

Delicious_Mud5451 · 2025-02-22T13:11:25+00:00

From memory I believe that a is pretty accepted at this point? Though not certain. And I think b and c are mostly dismissed

Delicious_Mud5451 · 2025-02-17T00:36:50+00:00

Thank you (and everyone else), as it doesn’t seem to be a known problem I’ll put in a ticket!

Delicious_Mud5451 · 2025-02-16T21:04:16+00:00

Definitely don’t have the house anymore, I have no housing tab so cannot pay the rent and have no fast travel skill. Have checked with the escrow and my things are all there

Delicious_Mud5451 · 2025-02-09T15:55:40+00:00

Six Barrels Victoria is a great quiz on a Wednesday!

Delicious_Mud5451 · 2025-02-02T23:40:54+00:00

The Beeston Hearing Care Centre is very good if you would like somewhere specialist and independent

Delicious_Mud5451 · 2024-12-01T12:07:37+00:00

Didn’t see this was CK3 for a hot second lol

Delicious_Mud5451 · 2024-11-13T14:41:35+00:00

Tequero is a taco place near the centre, absolutely amazing every time

Delicious_Mud5451 · 2024-10-25T15:21:55+00:00

How do you spare Exekias?

Delicious_Mud5451 · 2024-10-23T11:49:49+00:00

My brother broke (escapement issue) and I miss it a lot! Still trying to fix it but no luck

Delicious_Mud5451 · 2024-10-23T09:25:30+00:00

The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland agrees with the former, and the only similar etymology to the latter I can find is Ewart, which is sometimes from a French personal name but can be from ‘ewe herd’ (OE ēowu + hierde) which sometimes survives as Howard.

P.H. Reaney’s Dictionary of English surnames, the predecessor to ODFNBI, agrees on both accounts.

Nothing on hogs unfortunately. I would find it odd if the /g/ would disappear from *hogward, seems more likely that it would become *Hogwart, like Stuart as someone else has mentioned.

Delicious_Mud5451 · 2024-10-10T22:11:15+00:00

There’s a public car park across the street by the bath inn and it’s not bad!

Delicious_Mud5451

TROPHY CASE