Haworth

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A village in West Yorkshire, England, best known as the home of the Brontë sisters and their famous parsonage
2. A small town in the Pennine hills of northern England that is linked with the literary Brontë family
3. The Yorkshire settlement where the Brontë family lived at the parsonage that now serves as a museum

Etymology: Haworth is a place name rather than a common word, and its story is simply that of its two parts. It comes from Old English "haga", meaning an enclosure, yard or hedge, joined to "worþ", meaning an enclosure of its own. The pairing was a common way of naming a piece of land fenced off from the open ground around it, so the name literally describes a hedged enclosure. Many English place names built on "worþ" ended up as "-worth" or "-with" in modern spelling, and Haworth is one of the surviving examples. The name therefore records a settlement that began as a small walled or hedged holding, long before the village was known by its present form.