An index to personal names in English place-names

This book of mine was published in April 2021 by the English Place-Name Society. It was launched at the SNSBI spring 2021 conference.

Since 2022-01-11 the book (in a slightly corrected version) is downloadable for free.

This index is a finding aid for locating personal names in books about English place-names, primarily those published by the English Place-Name Society (EPNS). The principal purpose is to help researchers evaluate the probability of existence of conjectural personal names when considering new etymologies. The main index is an alphabetical list of those personal names which have been suggested to occur as elements in place-names, disregarding whether or not those suggestions are generally accepted. It should also be emphasized that this is not a list of specific identifiable people; it is an index of name-forms or name-types. The index also contains Anglo-Saxon personal names from additional (non-place-name) sources.

The book contains 12,598 headforms and 16,041 place-name forms in total. 8,057 of the headforms are not in the Prosopography of Anglo_Saxon England (PASE) database. Amongst all headforms, 551 are feminine (4.4%), and 344 headforms not in PASE are feminine (2.7%).

This is (coincidentally) an ultimate baby-name book. Nearly every name is authentic, but not now in use.

To order, please visit the other publications section of the EPNS website.

bibtex citation

@book{epns_index_personal_names,
  title=    {An index to personal names in English place-names},
  author=   {Keith Briggs},
  year=     {2021},
  series=   {EPNS Supplementary Series},
  volume=   {2},
  publisher={English Place-Name Society},
  address=  {Nottingham},
  ISBN=     {978-1-911640-04-2},
}