Radnor

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A historic county in the hilly east-central part of Wales, now merged into Powys ; a suburban township in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, on the Main Line west of Philadelphia
2. An old administrative county in the hills of mid-Wales, absorbed into Powys in the 1974 reforms ; a community in the eastern United States, a township near Philadelphia in the Pennsylvania suburbs
3. Former Welsh county lying in the uplands of eastern Wales that now forms part of Powys ; a Pennsylvania township in the Philadelphia suburbs known for its affluent residential areas

Etymology: Radnor is a noun taken from a place name: Radnorshire, a former county in the Welsh Marches, now part of Powys. The name itself is English in origin, built from Old English "rēad", meaning red, and "ōra", meaning bank or shore, so the place was named for a red-earthed bank. Welsh speakers know the area as Maesyfed, which means something quite different, so the English name is the one that stuck in the wider world. The word did not stay tied to the county. Radnor is also a surname and a name for other places, which is why it reads as a name first and a common noun second. Once a name has been attached to a breed, a product or a type of thing, it can slip into ordinary use with a lowercase initial, and that is the sense this entry records.