• toponym •
Pronunciation: tah-pê-nim • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: 1. Place name. 2. Word derived from a place name.
Notes: Paris, London, New Delhi are all toponyms, as are France, England, and Australia. The adjective is toponymic(al), a toponymist is a linguist who studies place names, and the subject of his or her study is typonomy.
In Play: Any name of a place is a toponym: "'Mazeppa' is an interesting toponym for a village in Central Pennsylvania." Also names used for objects based on place names are toponyms, for example, bikini (atoll in the Marshall Islands), china, cashmere (province of India), cologne (French for Köln, Germany), derby (England), jersey (one of the Channel Islands), and turkey.
Word History: Today's Good Word was formed within English by combining Greek topo(s) "place + onym(a) "name". Greek might have come by its word topos from a PIE word topo- "place", but little evidence outside Greek supports such an origin. Some etymologists associate it with Lithuanian tapti "to become" and Welsh tebyg "similar", but these aren't semantically compelling relatives. Onyma is better. It probably came from PIE no-men- "name", found perfectly preserved in Latin as nomen "name". Greek also has a variant onoma "name". Of course English name, German Name, Dutch naam, even Norwegian navn descend from the same source. Russian imya, imeni, Serbian ime, imeni and Czech jméno are all attached to the same PIE word.
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