Tom, Dick and geography: How places get their names

Toponymy is the study of place names. Often, areas are simply named after a local natural or geographical feature, such as a river, hill, forest or swamp. They’re sometimes named for a person or prominent structure, such as a fort, castle, conqueror or saint.

The most interesting toponyms can be traced to folk lore. Let’s start with a few country capitals. Scholars attribute the name of Yerevan in Armenia to the expression “Yerevats!” (“It appears!”). Legend has it that this is the cry Noah gave, in Armenian apparently, when his ark landed on Mount Ararat, the waters receded, and he looked to the north-east and spotted land in the direction of, well, Yerevan.

Baku in Azerbaijan, a place of fierce winter snowstorms, is widely held to have got its name from the Persian “bad-kube”, or “wind-pounded city” (kubidan being “to pound”).

Paris, France, got its present-day name from its early inhabitants, the Celtic Parisii tribe. It’s nickname, City of Light (La Ville Lumière), comes both from its leading role in the Age of Enlightenment, and because it was one of the first European cities to adopt gas streetlights, in the 1860s.

Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik, is Old Norse for “bay of smokes”, because of the many hot springs here, whose vapours could be seen from a distance. Indeed, the main street in the city’s downtown area, Laugavegur, is literally “washing street”, because this was the path women took to get to Laugardalur (“washing valley”), where the springs were, to do their washing.

Vatican comes from the Latin vaticinari, “to prophesy”, from the name of the hill, Mons Vaticanus, on which the tiny country sits. Why Vaticanus? Because the streets at its base were lined with fortune-tellers and soothsayers during the Roman Empire.

Istanbul in Turkey started out, in the 10th century, as Stanbul, derived from the Greek “stim boli”, meaning “in the city”. It’s a term that dates back to when Istanbul was still Constantinople. When the Greeks referred to that great heart of the Roman Empire, they simply said: The City.

One theory has it that Britain is derived from the Celtic word “pretani”, meaning “painted”, a reference to the fact that when Roman soldiers arrived here, they found the inhabitants of the islands covered in body paint and tattoos.

A similar place name based on appearance is Lapland, from the ancient Finnish “lapp”, meaning “wedge or patch of cloth”. One can assume that when rather better-clad Finns ventured here, into the Arctic Circle, they looked down upon the scraps of fur sewn together by the inhabitants.

Also not vastly impressed by their neighbours are Estonians. Various regions of that country have rather derogatory names. Kiimariigi means “country of lechery”; Linnusitamaa is “island of bird shit”; Mortsuka is simply “murderers”.

Spain’s Canary Islands, meanwhile, get their name not from the colourful birds but from canes, the Latin word for dogs, supposedly because of the “multitude of dogs of a huge size” found there, as noted in writings by the Roman chronicler and naturalist Pliny the Elder in the 1st century CE.

As for swamps, they were clearly everywhere. Brussels, Berlin and Switzerland all derive their names from words for marshy land. Even Paris was originally named Lutetia by the Romans, meaning land of mud.

(Adam Jacot de Boinod was a researcher for the BBC series QI and is the author of The Meaning of Tingo and Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World)