Why do some town names end in ham? Effingham, Illinois; Birmingham, Alabama; Gotham City, U.S.A. They all derive from the Old English ham meaning “home” or “homestead.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Town Names Ending in -ham”
Road trip! Judy Vickery wrote us. She is from San Diego and she and her sister are on a road trip across the country and they got to Effingham, Illinois, and they wanted to know about that name.
So they wrote us an email, but they didn’t ask about the effing part of Effingham. They wanted to know about the ham part!
They wanted to know, is ham short for hamlet?
And that’s a pretty good guess.
It’s sort of related to the word for hamlet, which means, of course, a small village.
But this kind of ham in that kind of word probably comes from the ham that’s in Old English meaning home or homestead.
You see the same kind of ham in Birmingham and in Gotham, the word Gotham, which probably meant something like the homestead where the goats were.
And so there are a lot of those place names like that that are old and hard to trace.
But anyway, Effingham, Illinois, and Effingham County are named for Thomas Howard, who was the third Earl of Effingham in England, who in 1775 refused to take arms against the American colonies.
So Binghamton is a little redundant at the end.
Binghamton.
Yeah, Tun, Farm.
I think Tun is Farm, is it not?
Oh, was it? I’m not sure.
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