Toponymy, toponymics, or toponomastics is the study of toponyms, including their origins, meanings, usage and types. Toponym is the general term for a proper name of any geographical feature, and full scope of the term also includes proper names of all cosmographical features.
The suffix -onym is a bound morpheme, that is attached to the end of a root word, thus forming a new compound word that designates a particular class of names. In linguistic terminology, compound words that are formed with suffix -onym are most commonly used as designations for various onomastic classes. Most onomastic terms that are formed with suffix -onym are classical compounds, whose word roots are taken from classical languages.
This is a list of etymological lists.
Placenames in the German language area can be classified by the language from which they originate, and by era.
An endonym is a common, native name for a group of people, individual person, geographical place, language or dialect, meaning that it is used inside a particular group or linguistic community to identify or designate themselves, their homeland, or their language.
Many places in Central Europe, mostly in the former German Empire and Austria-Hungary but now in non-German-speaking countries, traditionally had names in the German language. Many such names have been used for centuries by the German presence in the area dating back to Ostsiedlung, while some others were simply German transliterations of local names or names invented in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The toponym Albania may indicate several different geographical regions: a country in Southeast Europe; an ancient land in the Caucasus; as well as Scotland, Albania being a Latinization of a Gaelic name for Scotland, Alba; and a city in the U.S. state of New York.
An ethnonym is a name applied to a given ethnic group. Ethnonyms can be divided into two categories: exonyms and autonyms, or endonyms.
Old European is the term used by Hans Krahe (1964) for the language of the oldest reconstructed stratum of European hydronymy in Central and Western Europe.
Below is a list of German language exonyms for formerly German places and other places in non-German-speaking areas of the world. Archaic names are in italics.
An English exonym is a name in the English language for a place, or occasionally other terms, which does not follow the local usage. Exonyms and endonyms are features of all languages, and other languages may have their own exonym for English endonyms, for example Llundain is the Welsh exonym for the English endonym "London".
The ethnonyms for the Poles (people) and Poland include endonyms and exonyms. Endonyms and most exonyms for Poles and Poland derive from the name of the West Slavic tribe of Polans (Polanie), while in some languages the exonyms for Poland to derive from the name of another tribe – the Lendians (Lędzianie).
Latinisationof names, also known as onomastic Latinisation, is the practice of rendering a non-Latin name in a modern Latin style. It is commonly found with historical proper names, including personal names and toponyms, and in the standard binomial nomenclature of the life sciences. It goes further than romanisation, which is the transliteration of a word to the Latin alphabet from another script. For authors writing in Latin, this change allows the name to function grammatically in a sentence through declension.
Georgia is the Western exonym for the country in the Caucasus natively known as Sakartvelo. The Armenian exonym is Vrastan ; predominantly Muslim nations refer to it as Gurjistan or its many similar variations; while in mostly Slavic languages it is Gruziya.