<<Many books are written on name-origins, and they sell in the thousands, and many believe them; but serious students of the topic ought never to lose sight of the fact that the authors are making conclusions and deductions on the shakiest of grounds - and on even shakier logic.>> I think the place-name and surname experts would be the first to agree that it is seldom possible to prove the origin of any name beyond doubt - what they would say is that they offer the most likely explanation. (Though the reverse is certainly true - it is quite often possible to show that a proposed explanation cannot be correct). And they would say further that they base their explanations on (i) the earliest recorded forms of a name (not its modern form - the first thing any expert will tell you is that suggestions for origins based on modern forms are a complete waste of time) and (ii) detailed and extensive knowledge of the languages in use at the time the names were formed, and (most importantly) the way those languages changed over time. I've heard Margaret Gelling say that it is impossible to study place-name origins without a background in languages and linguistics. <<The City of Hereford is named for the place where armies forded - according to the assertions of several authors, on the grounds that "here" or similar (I forget) meant "army" back in the Olden Tymes. But it's a guess! My own guess is that the river Wye at that point was called the Arrow, which is an up-stream name for it today. So Hereford was formerly Arrer-ford. That's a guess, too. It will pay us in the long run to be cautious about claiming certainty where none exists by any objective measure. Oxford = Oxes' ford? Oh, please!>> Both these examples serve to illustrate the experts' methodology rather well. David Pott has already shown how the earliest spellings of Oxford, combined with a knowledge of Anglo-Saxon vocabulary and grammar, show that Oxford does indeed most probably mean the Ford of the Oxen. As for Hereford and the Arrow, the reason place-name experts like Ekwall and his modern successors do not connect the two is that they look in early sources like the Cartularium Saxonicum, where they find that the Arrow and Hereford appear in the same document from 958 as the Erga and Hereford - not as the Arrer and Arrerford. Of course, one document can be misleading, but if all subsequent spellings of Hereford are similar, and none of them show much resemblance to the name of the river, then a connection between the two names can be regarded as pretty unlikely. There is also the fact that 'here' appears in a number of place-names, few of them associated with rivers called anything similar, and some of them not associated with rivers at all. Many of them describe roads and fords, and the Anglo-Saxon word 'here' (meaning army) is the most obvious candidate to explain them. Further, they find that in other records of the same period the Wye is called the Guoy, Waega, Waia, Waie, Gui, Guy, Guai, Weye, names which show that its present form developed from a Celtic form like Gway - ie that it was not formerly called the Arrer (incidentally the Arrow is the name of an up-stream tributary of the Wye, not of the Wye itself). This is not guess-work, nor shaky logic, and certainly not folk-etymology - it is the application of research into early forms of the place-names and the languages current at the time. Regards, Matt