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A hydronym (from , hydrō, "water" and ὄνομα, onoma, "name") is a type of toponym that designates a proper name of a body of water. Hydronyms include the proper names of rivers and streams, lakes and ponds, swamps and marshes, seas and oceans. As a subset of toponymy, a distinctive discipline of hydronymy (or hydronomastics) studies the proper names of all bodies of water, the origins and meanings of those names, and their development and transmission through history.
Hydronyms from various languages may all share a common etymology. For example, the Danube, Don, Dniester, Dnieper, and Donets rivers all contain the Scythian name for "river" (cf. don, "river, water" in modern Ossetic). A similar suggestion is that the Jordan River, Yarkon River, and Yarmouk River (and possibly, with distortion, Zarqa River and/or Wadi Mujib) rivers in the Israel/Jordan area contain the Egyptian word for river (, transliterated in the Bible as ).
It is also possible for a toponym to become a hydronym: for example, the River Liffey takes its name from the plain on which it stands, called Liphe or Life; the river originally was called An Ruirthech. An unusual example is the River Cam, which originally was called the Granta, but when the town of Grantebrycge became Cambridge, the river's name changed to match the toponym. Another unusual example is the River Stort which is named after the town on the ford Bishops Stortford rather than the town being named after the river.
Therefore, hydronomy may be a tool used to reconstruct past cultural interactions, population movements, religious conversions, or older languages. For example, history professor Kenneth H. Jackson identified a river-name pattern against which to fit the story of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain and pockets of surviving native British culture.Kenneth H. Jackson, Language and History in Early Britain, (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1953) pp. 220-23. Summarized in H.R. Loyn, Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest, 2nd ed. 1991:7-9. His river map of Britain divided the island into three principal areas of English settlement: the river valleys draining eastward in which surviving British names are limited to the largest rivers and Saxon settlement was early and dense; the highland spine; and a third region whose British hydronyms apply even to the smaller streams.
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