The List of Historic Welsh Place Names received the Cynefin Project data from the National Library of Wales just before Christmas 2018, and since then, the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales has been going through them and cleansing the data in order to upload them to the List. This meant going through over 900,000 records, and pulling out each one that wasn’t actually a name, like ‘field’ or ‘house and garden’. This work is now completed, and the Commission is happy to announce they have an additional 515,902 names to add to the list.

The New Zealand Geographic Board Ngā Pou Taunaha o Aotearoa has made 824 Māori place names official. About 300 of them now officially include macrons, such as Taupō, Whakatāne, Whangārei, and Ōpōtiki.

The correct spelling of the names were a collaborative effort between the board and Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu to officially recognise their traditional tūturu names from their online cultural heritage atlas, Kā Huru Manu. The full list is available on the New Zealand Geographic Board website.

Many Māori place names have important stories behind them, so ensuring the correct spelling will help keep those stories alive. For example, as part of these changes New Zealand’s longest place name, Taumatawhakatangihangakōauauotamateapōkaiwhenuakitānatahu, has had macrons added. The name tells the story of the hill where Tamatea played his flute to his loved one.

This is a People Map of the US, where city names are replaced by their most Wikipedia’ed resident: people born in, lived in, or connected to a place.

Data for this story were collected and processed using the Wikipedia API. The period of collection was from July, 2015–May, 2019, from English Wikipedia. Person/city associations were based on the thousands of “People from X city” pages on Wikipedia. The top person from each city was determined by using median pageviews (with a minimum of 1 year of traffic). We chose to include multiple occurrences for a single person because there is both no way to determine which is more accurate and people can “be from” multiple places.

Here’s a selection of gaelic derived place names – from Ainmean-Àite na h-Alba (AÀA) ~ Gaelic Place-Names of Scotland the national advisory partnership for Gaelic place-names in Scotland.

Reproduced here with thanks to Ainmean-Àite na h-Alba and Bòrd na Gàidhlig.

For more on these names consult www.gaelicplacenames.org

Logainm is a new studio-based 26 part series celebrating and exploring the place names of Ireland. Much of Ireland’s history is locked up in its place names. They are a unique aspect of our shared culture and heritage. There are millions of place names all over the island, from the field behind your house, to the four provinces of Ireland. Each of them has its own story to unfold, each has a distinctive sense of place.

The presenter, renowned musician and singer, Breanndán Ó Beaglaoich is joined each week by a panel of guests who bring their expertise to bear on a lively discussion of Irish place names.