SNSBI is active on Facebook, with posts about events, new name-stories, and also mini name-stories. For technical reasons, the feed below cannot show images, and also cannot show cross-postings. Please click on the item of interest to see the full content.
Page likes: 144
Society for Name Studies in Britain and Ireland
(opens in a new tab)The SNSBI exists to promote the study of place-names, personal names, and other names. It has members within and beyond Britain and Ireland, some of them academics (students or staff) in relevant fields, but most from other walks of life.
Don't miss your chance to book online for our Autumn meeting on Saturday 14 November! Booking for online tickets ends on 13 November.
2026: Autumn meeting - University of Sheffield - SNSBI
www.snsbi.org.uk
The 2026 SNSBI autumn meeting will be held on Saturday 14 November. It will be online and in-person at the University of Sheffield.
Remember to book for the SNSBI 2026 Autumn Meeting before registration closes!Booking deadline for in-person attendance: 6 NovemberBooking deadline for online attendance: 13 NovemberThe Autumn Meeting, on the theme of Names and Power, will take place on Saturday 14 November at the University of Sheffield and online from 1000 to 1630.You can find details of the programme/registration on the SNSBI website:
2026: Autumn meeting - University of Sheffield - SNSBI
www.snsbi.org.uk
The 2026 SNSBI autumn meeting will be held on Saturday 14 November. It will be online and in-person at the University of Sheffield.
Ever wondered what a toft, a thwaite, or a tūn are? Or can't remember the difference between a hām and a hamm? Or perhaps you're curious about how many different words for "pig" appear in English place-names?All these questions and many, many more can be answered by downloading a copy of the thesaurus of English place-name elements by SNSBI member Jeremy Harte. We are grateful to Jeremy for assembling this document and making it freely available.It can be downloaded from the "place-names of England" section of our "Exploring names" website. And while you're there, why not have a look around at some of the other material, which covers also Scottish and Welsh place-names, and family names of Britain?www.snsbi.org.uk/exploring-names/place-names-of-england/
Our next name story is ‘Tom Jones’ and is written by Dr Peter McClure, Honorary Professor (Name-Studies) at the University of Nottingham. 'Tom Jones' was one of the most successful films of the 1960s, winning four Oscars, two Golden Globe Awards and three BAFTAs. It was an adaptation of Henry Fielding’s comic novel, which was set in Somerset and published in 1749. He describes it as ‘an allegory of human nature’ and gives some of his characters symbolic names. Fielding chose two names, Tom and Jones, that would signify his hero’s supposed commonness of birth and his allegorical role as a type of immature young man.The very large numbers for Jones in the western regions owe much to its later adoption in Wales. The name was already hereditary in south-western and western England by the early fourteenth century, particularly in Somerset (the county of Fielding’s Squire Allworthy), Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Herefordshire. Families with this name later migrated to nearby south Wales. In the sixteenth century, Welsh speakers in English-language contexts occasionally translated the patronymic ab Iefan ‘son of John’ as Jones, but relatively few of them used a fixed family name before the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jones has thus become identified in many people’s minds with Welshness, although in truth the surname belongs to the English as well. The ethnic ambiguity of the name has been cleverly exploited in the professional name of the Welsh singer (Sir) Tom Jones, who won popular acclaim in 1965 with the song ‘It’s Not Unusual’, and with the theme song from the James Bond film ‘Thunderball’. Jones is not his real surname, however, and his Welshness is mingled with an English ancestry that reflects the toing and froing of men and women across county boundaries and the England-Wales border for work and for marriage. Wikipedia records that the singer’s manager, Gordon Mills, learnt that Tom’s Welsh mother’s maiden name was Jones. He decided to capitalise on the popularity of the award-winning 1963 film, where, of course, the hero’s surname was chosen by Fielding for its popularity not in Wales but in Somerset, where Jones was the tenth most common surname in 1881.Read more at: www.snsbi.org.uk/exploring-names/surnames/tom-jones/Images: Tom Jones and Janis Joplin (1969), ABC Television, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; Distribution and frequency of Jones in 1881 (darker colours indicate higher numbers)
www.facebook.com/keithbriggs4/posts/pfbid0qMAL2KQjSY2wpardTYemZgicqSqEePKCKjYXwi25UKWMQw7qeWpvYZf...
This content isn't available right now
When this happens, it's usually because the owner only shared it with a small group of people, changed who can see it or it's been deleted.