Oglethorpe

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The English soldier and philanthropist who founded the American colony of Georgia in 1732 as a refuge for debtors
2. A British army officer and social reformer remembered as the founder of the colony of Georgia in North America
3. The 18th-century British general and prison reformer who established Georgia as a settlement for the poor and indebted

Etymology: James Oglethorpe, the English soldier and philanthropist who founded the colony of Georgia in 1732, carried a surname that began as a Yorkshire place name. Oglethorpe is a village in West Yorkshire, now part of Bramham cum Oglethorpe, and the name records a settlement founded by someone called Oddketill. That personal name came from Old Norse, the language of the Scandinavian settlers who reached northern England centuries earlier, and it combines "odd," meaning the point of a weapon, with "ketill," meaning cauldron. The second half of the place name is "thorpe," an Old Norse-derived word for an outlying farmstead or hamlet, common across the north and east of England. So the name literally means something like "Oddketill's outlying farm." Families who took their surnames from the village kept that old Norse-named origin, even as the founder's name faded from everyday memory.