Definition:
A place name or a word coined in association with the name of a place. The study of such place names is known as toponymy. See also:
Etymology:
From the Greek, "place" + "name"Examples and Observations:
- "The name Chicago is first recorded in 1688 in a French document, where it appears as Chigagou, an Algonquian word meaning 'onion field.'"
(The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 2000) - "An angry aide characterized the shopping spree as 'Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast.'"
("Hackers and Spending Sprees," Newsweek, November 5, 2008) - "Hooterville was Xanadu with pickup trucks, an odd yet comfortable land with an irresistible charm."
(Craig Tomashoff, "When Life Was Simple," The New York Times, July 4, 1999) - "When we find more than 600 places like Grimsby, Whitby, Derby, Rugby, and Thoresby, with names ending in -ly, nearly all of them in the district occupied by the Danes, we have striking evidence of the number of Danes who settled in England."
(Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable, A History of the English Language, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978) - "In Algonquian the forms linked together in a toponym are descriptive as in Mohican missi-tuk 'big river,' and the toponym as a whole is used to identify a particular place [that is, Mississippi]."
(William C. McCormack and Stephen A. Wurm, Approaches to Language: Anthropological Issues, Mouton, 1978) - "Words that you might not suspect were toponyms include tuxedo (Tuxedo Park, New York), marathon (from the battle of Marathon, Greece . . .), spartan (from Sparta in ancient Greece), bikini (an atoll in the Pacific where the atomic and hydrogen bombs were tested), [and] lyceum (a gymnasium near Athens where Aristotle taught) . . .."
(Charles H. Elster, What in the Word? Harvest, 2005)
Pronunciation: TOP-eh-nim
Also Known As: place name
