Acton

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A district in west London, England, part of the London Borough of Ealing
2. A residential area in London, situated in the borough of Ealing in the western part of the city
3. A locality in west London, England, forming part of the London Borough of Ealing

Etymology: Acton is a place-name rather than a common word, and its story is simply that of its two parts. It combines Old English "āc", meaning oak, with "tūn", meaning farm, homestead or enclosure. The result was a name for a settlement set among oak trees, the sort of description that many English villages acquired when they were first named. The "tūn" element is the more revealing of the two. In Old English it did not yet mean the walled town it came to suggest in later centuries; it referred to an enclosed piece of land and the buildings on it. That is why so many English place-names ending in "-ton" or "-town" began as little more than a farmstead, and why the name still describes a rural setting rather than an urban one. Acton also has a close relative in Aughton, which comes from the same two elements. The two names are doublets: the same words, passed down into modern English by slightly different routes and spellings, so that one name survives in the south and another in the north.