Otley

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A market town in West Yorkshire, England, situated on the River Wharfe near the edge of the Yorkshire Dales
2. A small English market town in the county of West Yorkshire, lying beside the River Wharfe in northern England
3. A town in the Wharfe valley of West Yorkshire, England, known for its market and its historic town centre

Etymology: Otley is a market town on the River Wharfe in West Yorkshire, and its name records a man who is otherwise lost to history. The first element is the Old English personal name "Otta", a name that does not survive in any written record, so the town's name is effectively the only trace of him. The second element, "lēah", meant a woodland clearing or glade, a word that survives in English as "-ley" and "-lea" in countless place names across England. Put together, the name means something like "Otta's clearing", the open ground where a settler, or his family, once worked the land among the trees. Many English place names follow this same pattern of a personal name joined to a landscape word, so Otley is typical of how Anglo-Saxon settlers labelled the places they farmed.