village.
This place is a village, a place where people live. And to take it a step further that H-A-M, ham itself, in old English means ‘home,’ which is why it sort of doubles to mean village as well. So that word ham actually means home.
What does ham in place name mean?
village or estate
Armed with just a little etymological expertise, you can easily decode common parts of place names. You’ll begin to notice some simple suffixes like ‘ton’ (farm or hamlet), ‘ham’ (village or estate), ‘ly’ or ‘ley’ (wood or a clearing), ‘stow’ (place or meeting place) and ‘bury’ (fort).
What does the ham mean in place names like Birmingham or Tottenham?
What does ‘ham’ mean? The suffix ‘ham’ could be taken from one of two words, ‘Ham’, the Saxon word meaning ‘settlement’, or ‘hamm’, meaning ‘water meadow’. A can also be an earthly feature roughly similar to a headland surrounded on three sides, usually by marsh.
What does ham mean in Nottingham?
The name of Nottingham is Anglo-Saxon in origin. A Saxon chieftain named Snot ruled an area known as Snotingaham in Old English; the homestead of Snot’s people (-inga = ‘the people of’; -ham = ‘homestead‘).
What is the meaning of ham in Birmingham?
The name Birmingham is derived from the Old English or Anglo-Saxon “Beormund ingas ham.” ‘Beormund’ is a proper name, ‘ingas’ means ‘people,’ and ‘ham’ means ‘farm/homestead.
What does slang go ham mean?
To go ham is to put in an extraordinary, even aggressive, amount of effort. If you went crazy eating ham, you’d be going ham on some ham. In this sense, ham may stand for hard as a motherf****r.
Why do town names end in Bury?
That’s because the suffix “-bury” derives from the Anglo-Saxon “burh,” meaning “a fort or fortified place.” So when you drive along I-84 from Waterbury to Danbury, passing Middlebury and Southbury along the way, you’re traveling a well-fortified route.
What does Bally mean in town names?
place of
Bally is an extremely common prefix to town names in Ireland, and is derived from the Gaelic phrase ‘Baile na’, meaning ‘place of‘.
Why is everything called shire in England?
“Shire” is just the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of the old French word “county”, so Yorkshire, for example, means “County of York”. A couple of them you have to manipulate a bit, presumably because Lancastershire and Chestershire were a bit of a mouthful; but it’s still fairly obvious where the name came from.
What does bury mean in place names?
a fortified place
Suffix. -bury. A placename suffix indicating a fortified place.
Why do British towns end with ham?
Herwick said that “ham” essentially means a village. “And to take it a step further, that H-A-M — that ‘ham’ itself — in old English means ‘home,’ which is why it sort of doubles to mean ‘village’ as well. So that word ‘ham’ actually means home,” he said.
What does ham mean in London?
The commonest suffix in compound London place names is ‘ham’ (the origin of the word ‘home’), which used to mean a collection of dwellings – often a farm – as in Ickenham, Lewisham and Rainham.
What does ham mean in Scottish?
Scottish National Dictionary (1700–)
HAM, v. Sc. usage: to cure meat, esp. hind-quarters of beef, pork or mutton, by salting and smoking them (Twd. 1825 Jam.).
What does ham mean in Ebonics?
Ham can be used to describe “a woman’s thighs, legs, or butt, [though the phrase] generally applies to the thighs [and] comes from the word ham, which is the thigh in a cut of pork.” And H.A.M., as an acronym, stands for “hard ass motherf*****s” — which is not necessarily a bad thing.
What does Chester mean in town names?
The English place-name Chester, and the suffixes -chester, -caster and -cester (old -ceaster), are commonly indications that the place is the site of a Roman castrum, meaning a military camp or fort (cf. Welsh caer), but it can also apply to the site of a pre-historic fort.
What does ham mean UK?
homestead
English: This map shows settlements, sourced from Wikipedia’s lists of places in the English counties, that end in the suffixes “-ham,” meaning “homestead,” or “-ingham,” meaning “homestead of the people.” These names are broadly accepted to have been the first kind of habitation names coined by the Germanic-speaking
What does a ham girl mean?
n (Chiefly U.S.) an attractive girl employed by the management of a bar to befriend male customers and encourage them to buy drinks.
Where did the term ham come from?
The modern word “ham” is derived from the Old English ham or hom meaning the hollow or bend of the knee, from a Germanic base where it meant “crooked”. It began to refer to the cut of pork derived from the hind leg of a pig around the 15th century.
Where does the expression ham come from?
Ham, in this case, is short for hamfatter, which means a low-grade actor or performer. And that comes from an unfortunately racist 19th century minstrel song called “The Ham-fat Man,” sung by blackfaced white performers as they ambled about, playing offensive caricatures of African Americans.
Why do so many towns end in Ford?
Ford in modern English still means to cross a river without a bridge. A town with the -ford suffix was where a river was broad and shallow so that people could cross.
What does Leigh mean in Devon?
clearings
‘Leighs’ are clearings. So Buckfastleigh is the old ley or pasturage of the abbey, and Gidleigh, the clearing of Gytha or Gydda, probably King Harold’s mother who was one of the biggest landowners in eleventh century Devon.