Fulbourn

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A village in the English county of Cambridgeshire, lying a few miles southeast of the city of Cambridge
2. A settlement in Cambridgeshire, England, located just outside the city of Cambridge in the East of England
3. A rural village in the county of Cambridgeshire in eastern England, near the city of Cambridge

Etymology: Fulbourn is a village about six miles southeast of Cambridge, and its name is a place-name formed from Old English elements rather than a word with a dramatic shift in meaning. The first part is probably "ful", a form of "full" meaning "foul" or "dirty," and the second part is "burn," an Old English word for a stream. Together the name most likely describes a muddy or foul-watered brook, a plain description that fits the marshy ground of the Cambridgeshire fens edge. The name is recorded in medieval documents in forms close to the modern spelling, which shows how stable it has been over many centuries. Place-names of this type were usually coined by Anglo-Saxon settlers, who named features of the landscape by what they saw and used, so the stream was likely named before the village grew up beside it.