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RR 2004/351 The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names: Based on the Collections of the English Place-Name Society Edited by Victor Watts Cambridge University Press Cambridge 2004 lxiv+713 pp. ISBN 0 521 36209 1 £175/$280
Keyword United Kingdom
Review DOI 10.1108/09504120410552895
This is the first comprehensive, scholarly, single volume dictionary of English place-names, expanding and updating Ekwall (1960) and Mills (1998) as well as other more popular dictionaries. It has been in preparation for, 15 years and during that time, and in the few decades before, members of the English Place-Names Society and other scholars have been examining vast quantities of archival materials such as chronicles, cartularies, charters, and monastic and legal records. Some of the results of that work have already been published in the Society's journal and in their county volumes, and the editors of this dictionary have drawn extensively on those publications and on the Society's archive housed at Nottingham University.
Whereas Ekwall based his dictionary on Bartholomew's Survey Gazetteer of the British Isles, selecting only those with some claim to antiquity and ignoring others that were comparatively late or selfexplanatory, Watts lists all the present-day names of cities, towns, villages, hamlets, rivers, streams, hills and other geographical locations, regardless of their age, that are shown in the Ordnance Survey Road Atlas of Great Britain (1983). Each place is identified by its post 1974 county or local administration names, quoting standard national grid reference letters and numbers (York,...