Puttenham

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. George Puttenham was an Elizabethan writer best known for The Arte of English Poesie ; Puttenham is also a small village in the county of Surrey in England
2. The name of an Elizabethan author who wrote a treatise on English poetry ; a small rural village in southern England, in Surrey
3. An English courtier and writer of the sixteenth century associated with poetics ; the name of a little village located in the English county of Surrey

Etymology: Puttenham is a place name rather than a common word, and its history is a compact one: it combines an Old English personal name with a word for settlement. The first element is "Putta," a personal name in Old English, and it appears in the genitive form "Puttan," meaning "of Putta." The second element is "hām," an Old English word meaning "homestead" or "settlement," which survives in English as the ending of many place names such as Birmingham and Nottingham. Put together, the name originally meant "Putta's homestead," the farm or settlement of a man called Putta. Many English villages took their names this way, so that the name records a founder or early landholder whose identity is now otherwise lost. The same pattern appears in countless places across England, where a personal name is followed by "-ham" to mark where a person's household had settled.