‘Find the lady’: The Term 'lady' in English and Scottish Place-Names

The term 'lady' serves as the qualifying element of a number of place-names in the British Isles, and has a range of applications. This paper presents a corpus of such names from north-west England and south-east Scotland, and discusses issues of interpretation. Attention is drawn to recurrent compounds that may be indicative of name types rather than of ad hoc formations, and to comparative evidence that may suggest a religious context for some names previously considered to be secular. Analysis of the corpus as a whole reveals significant differences between toponymic and lexical uses of the term 'lady', highlighting the distinction between onomastic and non-onomastic language.