Tag: language and dialect
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-ton, -by, llan- and bally-: what your town’s name is made of
I tagged 105,532 place names in Britain and Ireland by the English, Norse, Latin, Welsh and Gaelic words inside them, and checked Irish spellings against their official Irish forms. Kil- is a wood far more often than you might think.
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High Street or Main Street? The UK’s street-name divide
I sorted all 913,335 named streets in the UK by name. High Street rules the towns, Main Street the villages of Scotland, Northern Ireland, the East Midlands and Yorkshire, and every region has its own street words.
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What the world calls each other
I mapped 54,037 country names in 262 languages. Most countries are called something like their own name almost everywhere, but Germany has six families of names, and Chinese ‘virtue country’ and ‘beautiful country’ are mostly sound.
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Barm, bap, cob or roll? Britain’s bread roll lines
Roll, bun, bap, barm, cob, breadcake, teacake, muffin or batch? I mapped 20,038 answers from two dialect surveys, drew the lines where one word gives way to another, and checked whether the high street agrees.
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Dale, Down, Fell and Beck
Brook in the south, beck in the north, burn in the Borders. I mapped every named stream, valley and hill in Britain to find where the lines fall, how sharp they are, and whether they follow the Vikings.
