Colne

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A market town in Lancashire, England, in the Pendle area ; a river flowing through the south of England into the Thames system
2. A small industrial town in northwest England near Burnley ; a waterway in southern England that feeds into a larger river basin
3. A town in the county of Lancashire in northern England ; a river in the south of England with its own named watercourse

Etymology: Colne is a place name, borrowed from the names of several English rivers. The best-known is the River Colne in Lancashire, which gives its name to the market town of Colne, and there are further Colnes in Essex and Hertfordshire. The river names predate English itself. They come from the Celtic language spoken in Britain before the Anglo-Saxon settlements, and the name was then taken over by English speakers who settled along the valleys. The exact meaning of the Celtic root is uncertain. Scholars have proposed several possibilities, but none is firmly established, so the name's original sense is best treated as lost. What is clear is that the river name came first and the towns were named after it, which is typical of English place names: settlements often took their names from the water beside them.