And now, for something completely different: the etymology of English place names.
Some of our counties end in -land, especially in the North, which is pretty obvious: Cumberland, Westmorland, Northumberland.
Many others end in -shire (of LotR fame), which is an indigenous word for district, originating from Old English scir: Yorkshire, Staffordshire, Buckinghamshire.
Three counties in the South-East end in -sex, which comes from Old English Seaxe (Saxons). Each of these specifies a location: Essex, East; Sussex, South; and the historic county Wessex, West. There is no “Nossex”, just as there’s no North Riding of Yorkshire.
In the South-West are Dorset and Somerset. -set seems to descend from an Old English word saete, which meant simply “people” or “settlers”.
Cornwall’s name has been suggested to have originally nothing to do with either corn or walls, but rather be a fusion of a reconstructed Celtic word karnos, meaning horn (compare Latin cornu) and an Old English term wealh (foreigner). So, something to do with foreigners who had hunting- or drinking-horns, perhaps – likely an exonym.
The Isle of Wight is, surprisingly, not named for its white chalk cliffs. Rather, it’s just an evolution of its Classical name Uectis, which it bore as part of the Roman Empire. This in turn has been suggested to be a Latinisation of an unrecorded Celtic name Ixtis, meaning “nether”, ie. the most southern part of Britain.
So, what about our towns and cities?
The suffix -chester, eg. in Manchester, is rooted in the Latin castra (military camp), via Old English ceaster (city, town). Sometimes this has been otherwise mutated, such as in Lancaster or Leicester.
There are towns named after an important ford (river crossing). Sometimes their first part is the name of the river, eg. Chelmsford (the ford over the River Chelmer). Other times it’s a generic noun, like in Oxford. Towns ending in such words as -port, -castle, -field and so on are similarly obvious.
The -minster in Westminster means cathedral and derives from Latin monasterium.