Torpenhow Hill (, ) is claimed to be the name of a hill near the village of
Torpenhow in
Cumbria
Cumbria ( ) is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in North West England, bordering Scotland. The county and Cumbria County Council, its local government, came into existence in 1974 after the passage of the Local Government Act 1972. Cumb ...
, England, a name that is
tautological. According to an analysis by linguist
Darryl Francis
Darryl Francis (born 16 April 1948) is a well-known author of books on Scrabble.
He was a co-compiler of Chambers' original Official Scrabble Words publication in 1988 and consultant on all future editions, along with ex ABSP chairman Allan S ...
and locals, there is no landform formally known as Torpenhow Hill there, either officially or locally,
which would make the term an example of a
ghost word
A ghost word is a word published in a dictionary or similarly authoritative reference work even though it had not previously had any meaning or been used intentionally. A ghost word generally originates from a typographical or linguistic error, tak ...
.
A.D. Mills in his ''Dictionary of English Place-Names'' interprets the name as "Ridge of the hill with a rocky peak", giving its etymology as Old English ''torr'', Celtic *''penn'', and Old English ''hoh''.
In 1688, Thomas Denton stated that Torpenhow Hall and church stand on a 'rising topped hill', which he assumed might have been the source of the name of the village.
[English Place Name Society, 1950, ''The Place-names of Cumberland'', p. 326] Denton apparently exaggerated the example to a "Torpenhow Hill", which would quadruple the "hill" element, but the existence of a toponym "Torpenhow Hill" is not substantiated.
In 1884, G.L. Fenton proposed the name as an example of "quadruple redundancy" in
tautological placename etymologies, i.e. that all four elements of the name might mean "hill".
It was used as a convenient example for the nature of
loanword
A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because th ...
adoption by Thomas Comber in c. 1880.
["the name thus meaning in reality hill-hill-hill-hill. Fortunately the Normans let it remain, and we are spared from having to call the place 'Torpenhow hill-mount'." Thomas Comber, "The Origin of the English Names of Plants", ''The Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society'', Volume 15 (1904)]
p. 616
See also
*
List of tautological place names
A place name is tautological if two differently sounding parts of it are synonymous. This often occurs when a name from one language is imported into another and a standard descriptor is added on from the second language. Thus, for example, New ...
*
Cumbrian toponymy
Cumbrian toponymy refers to the study of place names in Cumbria, a county in North West England, and as a result of the spread of the ancient Cumbric language, further parts of northern England and the Southern Uplands of Scotland.
The histor ...
*
:Mountains and hills of Cumbria
References
{{Reflist
Place name etymologies
Fictional locations in the United Kingdom
Linguistic controversies