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Indigenymy: English Meanings of Place Names
Indigenymy: English Meanings of Place Names
The same underlying dataset as the Names view, filtered down to toponyms whose English meaning or significance is recorded in our sources. A subset of the full corpus, but the richest window into how places were understood by the people who named them.
What you're looking at: A meaning is the English translation of the place name itself (e.g., "where the herring spawn"), not a locational descriptor. We deliberately don't include circular meanings like "colonial name of the bay" — if the meaning duplicates the location, it's omitted.
On click, each toponym shows: the name's meaning, the endonym (Indigenous name) for the language, the ISO 639-3 code, the source publication year and title with a link to the source, and a link to the Glottolog page for the language.
Source: Drawn from 7,080 toponyms across 35 languages. Not every source records a meaning for every toponym; some recorded meanings exist in our sources but aren't yet transcribed.
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