Listers, I could see that the 'old English' that this thread was getting into was beyond the ken of most of us so I enlisted the brains of one of our leading place name etymologists. Below are his thoughts. David Pott Firstly, thank you (I think!) for forwarding the rather confused OEL thread. I'm not sure quite how to unpick it, but here goes... There is no question of a connection between -ac and wic. (1) Regarding the former, Ian Buckley and his French correspondent seem to me to have answered the question admirably and concisely, and we may disregard the wilder speculations. We are dealing with an originally adjectival suffix used to form place-names and river-names. The form in British (i.e. the common Brittonic stage of Celtic language) is -ako- (with a long a). As noted by Dr Buckley, a reflex of this appears in Welsh as -og. It is there too in Cornish -ek. To the Continental examples already mentioned could be added numerous place-names in Britian, such as York (probably 'yew-tree place'), the first part of Berkshire ('hilly place'), Cam Beck [river in Cumberland] and Cammock [hill in West Yorkshire] (both 'crooked one'). For several useful references to fuller discussions see Coates & Breeze (2000) 'Celtic Voices, English Places', p.354 s.v. -og. (2) As for the latter, Old English wic is of course a borrowing from Latin vicus (both with long i), the key sense in both languages being 'specialized area/settlement': in its earliest applications the Old English word appears generally to be used in the sense 'trading post'. Other types of specialization are perhaps discernable at various stages of the word's long history, but I rather suspect that an element of trade underlies them all. The notion that all the place-names in England which have hitherto be explained as containing wic are actually reformations of earlier names in -ako- is far-fetched. We have ample early documentation which absolutely precludes this. Such a development is not in itself impossible or even implausible, at least in an individual case or two (indeed the development of York from Ebur(o)-ako- via a pseudo-Old English form Eoforwic demonstrates precisely this reanalysis), but cannot be taken as feasible across the board. It could never account for wic as a first element in compounds such as Wickham, or as a simplex name Wick, nor could it account for the palatal form of names like Sandwich, Fordwich, and Harwich. Hope that was more of a help than a hindrance, All the best Paul Dr Paul Cullen Institute for Name-Studies School of English Studies University of Nottingham > Nevertheless, one can entertain the possibility that every -wick name in > England was once a -ck place-name indicator, in the time before the Latin > renaming of such places. It is at least reasonable to propose that the > Latin word was a variant of another Indo-European word carrying the same > meaning. (And if not a variant of a such a word, what was the origin of the > Latin?) Also, what word or suffix did the British or Irish Celts use as a > place-indicator?