The name of any town or city typically begins as a meaningful description of that settlement in the everyday language of the people who live there. It is less apparent to the modern eye, perhaps, that place names and the vocabulary at large also intersect by virtue of the way those names come into existence. Less transparent examples, often with a longer history or a more exotic origin, are common amongst terms for fabrics like denim (recorded in 1695 as serge denims, or ‘from Nîmes’ in southern France), damask (from Damascus), muslin (ultimately from Mosul, northern Iraq), and closer to home, worsted (from Worstead, the name of a village in Norfolk), and crimplene (perhaps from the name of the Crimple Valley near Harrogate, Yorkshire, where it was first manufactured by ICI).
On the cheeseboard, for instance, we find our own Cheshire, Stilton, and Cheddar alongside Brie (France), Gruyère (Switzerland), Taleggio (Italy), Manchego (Spain), and Havarti (Denmark). This process gives rise to a large number of words where the name of a product’s place of origin comes to stand for the product itself. Over time, the second element of compounds like this is often dropped, so that it is possible to talk of studying at Oxford (rather than at Oxford University), or spreading one’s toast with Cooper’s Oxford (rather than Oxford marmalade).
The OED does have an entry for Oxford, not to cover the name of the city itself, but to accommodate compounds where the name qualifies another word: like Oxford University and Oxford Union, as well as Oxford bags (a style of wide-legged trousers popular among students in the 1920s), Oxford John (a spicy eighteenth-century stew made with stale mutton ‘collops’, ripe for recreation by Heston Blumenthal), Oxford marmalade (first made commercially in the 1870s by the Cooper family at 83 High Street), and Oxford comma (the kind I have just used). Probably the most immediately obvious situation in which place names make contact with the vocabulary at large is when they come to be used as elements of words or phrases that require definition in their own right. It is at these points of contact with the ‘common vocabulary’ that place names made their way into his first edition of the Dictionary, as they do in the latest. Place names arise from ordinary words, and can go on to make up or function as ordinary words. In addition to, and behind, the common vocabulary … lies an infinite number of Proper or merely denotative names, outside the province of lexicography, yet touching it in thousands of points. As James Murray, the first editor of the OED, wrote: That is not to say, however, that they have been excluded from dictionaries altogether. Little wonder, then, that lexicographers of the English language since Dr Johnson and before have tended to balk at the idea of writing entries for place names.
The names of countries, cities, and towns might be obvious candidates, but what about villages and hamlets, hills and rivers, or buildings, streets, and fields? Would we stick to the names of places in Britain, or would we want to cover names in all countries where English is spoken? We use the names of places in non-English speaking countries in English all the time: should we include them too? Then, of course, for a historical dictionary like the OED there is the task of tracing the origin and development of each name, a specialist endeavour involving detailed local knowledge, access to unpublished documents, and extensive fieldwork. On a practical note, there is the question of which names to cover. A common noun denotes a class of items with a set of shared characteristics that can be outlined in a dictionary definition, but a place name works more as a label, a way of referring in speech or writing to a single, particular place. To begin with, a place name cannot really be defined.
For the lexicographer names in general, and place names in particular, pose all kinds of problems. As any Scrabble player knows, dictionaries of English tend not to include entries for names-of people, organizations, or places.
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