Place names are fossils. Long after the people who coined them are gone, the words sit there on the map, quietly recording who arrived, what language they spoke and what they found when they got there. We have the names and rough locations of 43,033 settlements across Britain, so we did something simple: we sorted them by how they end. What came back was one of the cleanest pieces of history you can find in a spreadsheet.
What the Endings Mean
A handful of endings account for a huge share of English place names, and each one carries a meaning and a language of origin.
The common endings and where they come from
- -ton Old English tun, a farmstead or enclosed village
- -ham Old English ham, a homestead or settlement
- -ley Old English leah, a woodland clearing
- -by Old Norse, a farmstead or village (the Viking word)
- -thorpe Old Norse, a smaller, outlying settlement
- -thwaite Old Norse thveit, a clearing or meadow
The first three are English, the legacy of the Anglo-Saxons who settled most of the country. The last three are Norse, brought by the Scandinavian armies and farmers who arrived from the late ninth century. Keep that split in mind, because it is about to draw a map for us.
Counting 43,000 Names
Here is how the endings break down across our settlements:
| Ending | Origin | Settlements |
|---|---|---|
| -ton | Old English | 4,364 |
| -ley | Old English | 1,223 |
| -ham | Old English | 1,000 |
| -by | Old Norse | 540 |
| -thorpe | Old Norse | 291 |
| -thwaite | Old Norse | 69 |
The Old English endings dominate, which is exactly what you would expect in a country the Anglo-Saxons settled from end to end. The Norse endings are far fewer. But the headline number is not the interesting bit. The interesting bit is where those Norse names are.
The Viking Frontier
In 886 a treaty between Alfred the Great and the Viking leader Guthrum split England in two. The north and east, governed under Scandinavian law, became known as the Danelaw. More than a thousand years later, you can still see almost exactly where that border ran, because the Viking settlers left their word for "village" stamped on the landscape. Here is where the -by names actually are:
| County | Settlements ending in -by |
|---|---|
| Lincolnshire | 189 |
| North Yorkshire | 110 |
| Cumbria | 62 |
| Leicestershire | 45 |
| East Riding of Yorkshire | 17 |
| Nottinghamshire | 15 |
Lincolnshire alone has 189 villages whose names end in -by. Add Yorkshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire and you have drawn the eastern Danelaw without ever looking at a history book. The -thorpe names tell the identical story: Lincolnshire 61, North Yorkshire 39, Norfolk 29, Nottinghamshire 23. Cross the old frontier into the south and west of England and these endings all but vanish. The Vikings settled here, farmed here, named their villages here, and the names never left.
The Other Norse
One county breaks the eastern pattern: Cumbria, with 62 -by names and the lion's share of the rare -thwaite ending. Cumbria sits on the wrong side of the country for the Danish Danelaw, and that is the point. Its Norse names came from a different direction entirely, brought by Norwegian Vikings who crossed the Irish Sea from settlements in Ireland and the Isle of Man. That is why Cumbria is full of -thwaites while Lincolnshire is full of -bys. Two separate waves of Norse settlement, two coasts, two fingerprints in the data.
The Commonest Names
While we were counting, we also looked at which settlement names repeat most often across the country.
The most repeated settlement names in Britain
- Newtown 53 places
- Newton 48 places
- West End 47 places
- Church End 37 places
- North End 35 places
- Upton 32 places
There is a lovely ordinariness to this list. The most common place names in Britain are not grand or romantic; they are practical descriptions. The new town, the west end of the village, the bit by the church, the north end. People named where they lived after the most obvious thing about it, and they did it so consistently that dozens of identical names dot the map today.
Why Names Outlast Everything
Buildings fall down. Borders move. Languages are replaced. Place names are the survivors. The Anglo-Saxons gave way to the Vikings, the Vikings to the Normans, and English itself changed beyond recognition, yet a farmer in Lincolnshire still lives in a village whose name a Danish settler chose eleven centuries ago. When you next pass a road sign ending in -by or -thorpe, you are reading a word in Old Norse, and you are standing inside the old Danelaw.
You can wander the settlements of any county through our area guides, starting from England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and working down to individual towns and villages.