Hydronym

A hydronym (from ὕδρω, hydrō, "water" and ὄνομα, onoma, "name") is a type of toponym that designates a proper name of a body of water. Hydronyms include the proper names of rivers and streams, lakes and ponds, swamps and marshes, seas and oceans. As a subset of toponymy, a distinctive discipline of hydronymy (or hydronomastics) studies the proper names of all bodies of water, the origins and meanings of those names, and their development and transmission through history. Within the onomastic classification, main types of hydronyms are (in alphabetical order): helonyms: proper names of swamps, marshes and bogs, limnonyms: proper names of lakes and ponds, oceanonyms: proper names of oceans, pelagonyms: proper names of seas and maritime bays, potamonyms: proper names of rivers and streams. Often a given body of water will have several entirely different names given to it by different peoples living along its shores. For example, and แม่น้ําโขง mɛ̂ː náːm khǒːŋ are the Tibetan and Thai names, respectively, for the same river, the Mekong in southeast Asia. (The Tibetan name is used for three other rivers as well.) Hydronyms from various languages may all share a common etymology. For example, the Danube, Don, Dniester, Dnieper, and Donets rivers all contain the Scythian name for "river" (cf. don, "river, water" in modern Ossetic). A similar suggestion is that the Yarden, Yarkon, and Yarmouk (and possibly, with distortion, Yabbok and/or Arnon) rivers in the Israel/Jordan area contain the Egyptian word for river (itrw, transliterated in the Bible as ye'or). It is also possible for a toponym to become a hydronym: for example, the River Liffey takes its name from the plain on which it stands, called Liphe or Life; the river originally was called An Ruirthech. An unusual example is the River Cam, which originally was called the Granta, but when the town of Grantebrycge became Cambridge, the river's name changed to match the toponym. Another unusual example is the River Stort which is named after the town on the ford Bishops Stortford rather than the town being named after the river.