Ecclefechan

Part of speech: noun, adjective

Definitions

1. A small village in Dumfries and Galloway in southern Scotland, known as the birthplace of the writer Thomas Carlyle
2. A village in the Scottish region of Dumfries and Galloway that is famous as the birthplace of historian Thomas Carlyle
3. A small Scottish village in the Annandale area of Dumfries and Galloway, where the essayist Thomas Carlyle was born in 1795

Etymology: Ecclefechan is a village in Dumfriesshire, in southwest Scotland, and its name is a compound of two words from Cumbric, the Brittonic (Celtic) language once spoken across what is now northern England and southern Scotland. The first element, "eglēs", meant "church", and the second, "vechan", meant "small". Put together, the name describes a little church, and it is the same pattern found in the Welsh "eglwys" and "fechan". The name thus preserves a fragment of a language that otherwise left few traces on the map of Scotland. Cumbric died out over the early medieval period, and place names like this one, with their Brittonic elements sitting in a landscape later dominated by Old English and Scots, are among the few surviving evidence of the people who once spoke it.