Thursday, 6 May 2010



How do we pronounce Chideock?

The answer is ˈtʃɪdək, as if spelt “Chiddock”.

According to the village website,





  1. Interestingly, I think Betws-y-Coed is a Welsh placename which seems to have a borrowing from Old English: betws is "bede-house", i.e. house of prayer.

  2. Then there's the famous Torpenhow Hill!

  3. Torpenhow Hill is a fabrication of Mario Pei. Not only is it not true that Torpenhow Hill is a name consisting of 4 elements each one meaning "hill", there isn't even a hill called Torpenhow Hill.

    Darryl Francis has debunked Mario Pei's claim in the article "The debunking of Torpenhow Hill":

  4. In Cornish the cognate of coed/coeden turns up in quite a few different guises: gwidden, widden, quidden, quite...

    We also have a few doublet names down here, The closest to where I live is Castle An Dinas = "castle the castle". And I recently did a post on my blog about Gurnard's Head, where there are the remains of a promontory fort called Treryn Dinas, which appears to mean "a castle by a farm by a castle".

  5. *cę̄d might be the correct Proto-Brythonic reconstruction, but the correct Proto-Celtic reconstruction (according to Ranko Matasović's Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Celtic) is *kayto-. It's related to the first part of the Gaulish placename Caitobrix and more distantly to Gothic haiþi and English heath.