{"id":1306,"date":"2009-02-03T08:00:11","date_gmt":"2009-02-03T07:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=1306"},"modified":"2009-02-03T08:00:11","modified_gmt":"2009-02-03T07:00:11","slug":"do-you-know-what-your-name-means","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=1306","title":{"rendered":"Do you know what your name means?"},"content":{"rendered":"

My first name Roger was brought to England by the Normans – it comes from two Germanic words ‘hrod’ and ‘gar’ meaning respectively ‘fame’ and ‘spear’.
\nMy family name Darlington came originally from the English place name ‘Deornothingtun’ in the north-east of England.
\nWorking backwards, ‘tun’ (our ‘ton’) is found in hundreds of English place names from Stockton to Brighton and means simply \u2018settlement\u2019. Indeed our word’ ‘town’ comes, in fact, from ‘tun’.
\n‘Ing’ is a difficult word, that here means \u2018named for\u2019.
\nThen we have ‘Deornoth’ which was a man\u2019s name – giving us ‘Deornothingtun’ as ‘the Settlement Named for Deornoth’.
\nAnd what do we know about Deornoth? Unfortunately, absolutely nothing. No records have made it down to us.
\nBut the word ‘Deornoth’ does tell us something about the times that he lived in for, as with almost all early English names, ‘Deornoth’ is really two words combined. ‘Deor’ meant \u2018beast\u2019 – our word ‘deer’ comes from here. ‘Noth’, on the other hand, meant \u2018boldness\u2019. So ‘Deornoth’ was ‘Beast-boldness’.
\nAnd when did ‘Beast-boldness’ live? Well, ‘the Settlement Named for Beast Boldness’ was first recorded in the eleventh century, but it may have been five hundred years old by then, so it could date back to the Angeln ‘invasion’ about 500 AD.
\nI’m very interested in naming practices around the world – which are really varied – which is why I wrote this essay<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My first name Roger was brought to England by the Normans – it comes from two Germanic words ‘hrod’ and ‘gar’ meaning respectively ‘fame’ and ‘spear’. My family name Darlington came originally from the English place name ‘Deornothingtun’ in the north-east of England. Working backwards, ‘tun’ (our ‘ton’) is found in hundreds of English place […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-life-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1306\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}