I’m wondering if someone could help me on this-I’m wondering if sometimes in British (as well as American too) town nomenclature if sometimes the specification of a town’s juxtaposition in that name relative to the center of whatever center/middle of something (like the whole state/country/district) isn’t fully provided for or thought out for all directions. For example take the -sex suffix. East, west, and south (Essex, Wessex and Sussex) are thought out. But what about north? What would it be? Norsex? Nosex? Notsex? And then there’'s the -folk suffix, where only north and south (Norfolk and Suffolk) are taken care of. But what about east and west? Efolk? Wefolk? And what about the middle? Sexfolk? Folksex? It looks like whenever you have a town with folk and sex in it you’ve got trouble. I have dozens more (unfortunately) but how is all this taken care of? Just some off-the-wall name to complete the set? I thought and I’d hope we’d have a better aesthetic consciousness than that! Thanks.
The names given to geographical locations respond to the needs of the people that use them, not to check boxes on a list.
The -sex suffix refers to Saxons. The people who settled in the places we now call the counties of Essex and Sussex were the East Saxons and the South Saxons. Wessex isn’t a real place you’ll find on a map any more, but originally it meant the land of the West Saxons. There was also a county called Middlesex, which is where the Middle Saxons lived. There was never a Norsex because there was no place north of the others that was designated as being where Saxons lived.
The counties of Norfolk and Suffolk are both on the east coast, so anyone who lived east of there would be in the sea. West of them the land was named by/for people that lived there.
Surely you’re not interested in the North/South Carolina/Dakota and West Virginia issues, are you?
There are many towns/cities where a directional name has been attached to an adjoining community to distinguish the (I would assume) more recent one from the older one. Examples abound, but West Memphis comes to mind.
It might be a fun adjunct to the thread to identify some name where all four cardinal compass points (NEWS) have been affixed to the same name. In the case of -umberland, I can only thing of North-, for instance. And there are places like Middleboro (I can’t remember just where offhand, and maybe it’s Middlesboro) but are there other -boro places nearby?
I do seem to recal there being all four varieties of -gate, but I don’t think they’re all in the same region. If so, I can’t think of where.
Fun trivia thread, I suspect.
Northumberland originally meant the land to the north of the Humber river.
There are lots of places ending -brough or -borough, but no Northborough, Southborough etc. either side of Middlesbrough. A burgh was one of the names that meant settlement (often fort or garrison) in pre-Saxon times. It’s not clear where Middlesbrough got its name; it may have come from its location midway between Durham and Whitby or it may be a corruption of a local ruler’s name.
You might find this site helpful for understanding some place names in that region.
everton makes a good point by identifying one of the synonyms for “town” or “village” that’s imbedded in so many place names. Others in that category that spring to mind:
-ville
-burg
-ton
-ham
-mont
-dale
-land
-shire
-brook
Others?
Place names ending -gate typically have one of two origins. Gata was a viking word for road, so you’ll find towns that were named because they were on the road through something significant or to somewhere else (e.g. Harrogate derives from Har-low-Gata meaning Grey-Hill-Road). You’ll also find street names in viking towns that end in -gate (e.g. Castlegate, Marygate etc. in York).
The other use of gate is the more prosaic one of a street or district that was near a gate in a city wall. Here are some in the city of Coventry.
Northgate, Southgate, Eastgate and Westgate are all used for place names, but not all in the same county. They are all used in the various Danish influenced counties down the east coast of England though.
-wick/-wich (farm); -kirk (church); -by (viking settlement); -thorpe (poor land); -chester/-caster (Roman garisson); -ing (“people of” or “small river”) -car (marsh); -low (hill); -bury (fortified settlement); -mere (lake) etc. etc.
There are lots of duplicates/alternates depending on the language of the people who named the places concerned. For example, there are special prefixes and suffixes that are found in Wales, Scotland and Cornwall that come from the Celtic languages of those places.