Torpenhow Hill

Torpenhow Hill is a hill near the village of Torpenhow in Cumbria, England that has acquired a name that is a quadruple tautology. There is no landform officially known as Torpenhow Hill there; the name is a ghost word,[1] and is sometimes used as an example of "quadruple redundancy" in tautological placename etymologies (such as the Laacher See's "lake lake" and the Mekong River's "river river river").

Tor, pen, and how can all mean "hill" in different languages (torr from Old English, penn from Old Welsh and haugr from Old Norse, respectively)[2] so that a literal translation of "Torpenhow Hill" would be "Hill-hill-hill Hill", in an extreme example of a multilingual tautological place name.[3] It was used as a convenient example for the nature of loanword adoption by Thomas Comber in c. 1880.[4] The idea apparently goes back to Denton (1688)[5] who noted 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.[6] The current village of Torpenhow is on the side of a hill rather than at the top.

Modern etymological reference works interpret the name of Torpenhow as indeed derived from the three elements mentioned, but tor+penn is not interpreted as a tautology, but rather as expressing the idea of "top or breast of a hill", to which howe was added in a single tautology.[7]

Several online mapping services mark the hill near the village of Torpenhow as being "Torpenhow Hill".[2]

See also

References
  1. Francis, Darryl (2003). "The Debunking of Torpenhow Hill". Word Ways. 36 (1): 6–8.
  2. "Hill Hill Hill Hill, debunked, debunked". youtube.com. Tom Scott. 1 February 2021. Retrieved 1 February 2021.
  3. Fenton, G. L. (12 July 1884). "Torpenhow". Notes and Queries. 6th Series. 10 (237): 25–26.
  4. "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'." Th. Comber, "The Origin of the English Names of Plants", The Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society, Volume 15 (1904), p. 616.
  5. Thomas Denton: A Perambulation of Cumberland, 1687-8, including descriptions of Westmorland, the Isle of Man and Ireland. 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. Francis, Darryl (2003). "The Debunking of Torpenhow Hill". Word Ways. 36 (1): 6–8.
  6. English Place Name Society, 1950, The Place-names of Cumberland, p. 326
  7. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Placenames (4th ed. 1960). David Mills, 2011, A Dictionary of British Place-Names "Ridge of the hill with a rocky peak".
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