Victor Watts, John Insley, Margaret Gelling. The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. lxiv + 713 pp. $250.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-36209-2.
Reviewed by E. Joan Wilson Miller (Department of Geography-Geology, Illinois State University)
Published on H-HistGeog (July, 2004)
Neither the heft nor the size of this dictionary is a handicap to its easy use by historians, archaeologists, philologists, linquists, scholars of English studies, geographers, and interested amateurs. The skilled binding, the good quality paper, and the varied typeface increase its value to the scholarly study of the origins and meanings of English place names. Every name in current use has been taken from the Ordnance Survey's computerized county indices and the 1983 Ordnance Survey Atlas of Great Britain with its colored "Routemaster" maps on a scale of 1:250,000. The county collections, published and unpublished, and the archives of the Place Name Survey of the English Place-Name Society are the sources for entries of the scholarly research on the dates of the earliest written records of names and their meanings, changing landownerships, and spellings.
The genesis of this dictionary began with the decision of the Society to update the work of Eilert Ekwall and his fourth edition in 1960 of the Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names. It became the work of Victor Ernest Watts, Master of Grey College of the University of Durham. Unfinished at his death, it was completed by two editors, John Insley and Margaret Gelling. The work took fifteen years and was stored electronically.
There are adjuncts to the alphabetized entries such as distribution maps of elements, a glossary of most frequently used common elements, abbreviations, a bibliography, and a guide to 552 sources. Watts wrote the lengthy preface. An innovation is the inclusion of sixteen black and white line drawings by a geographer, Ann Cole. These uncluttered drawings have onomastic relevance; they elucidate meanings of topography and were based on her observations in the field. Another asset is the inclusion in the text of the two-letter, four-figure National Grid references making for rapid location of names.
Ekwall's last edition had 17,500 place-names. The new dictionary has 18,500 and not all of them are etymological statements of antiquarian settlements. Linguistically, they extend from pre-Indo-European to Modern English and include research findings of the structures of names and their functions in the habitats of their authors. The compilers stressed human activities, ancient and modern, and included topography and vegetation. Sometimes a short, well-written paragraph follows the scholarly entry and adds detail. They call these "snapshots." For example, there is the new town of Peterlee, the airport at Stanstead, the river gap at Lewes, the flooks of Flookburgh, the iron works of Old Park, the Royal Military Canal, the Royal Military Academy, the lightship Royal Sovereign, and the Royal British Legion Village. There are some concerns about the use of this volume. The easy location of the names in the O.S. Atlas is hampered by the lack of a spiral binding, so some names are hard to find on pages which do not lie flat. Then there is the price. As a reference tool it should be in college and university libraries. Librarians in public libraries might ask whether they should buy such an expensive volume when there is the Internet for information.
The English Place-Name Society now has an Internet pilot program on names of Nottinghamshire, but it will be a long time before this project will provide national details which are to be culled from this book. The Cambridge University Press is to be commended for its courage at a time of IT and financial exigencies. Scholars will need this book as well as Ekwall's volumes. Interested amateurs will use this as a browsing book. It will have a long shelf life and be much loved by Anglophiles.
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Citation:
E. Joan Wilson Miller. Review of Watts, Victor; Insley, John; Gelling, Margaret, The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names.
H-HistGeog, H-Net Reviews.
July, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=9643
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