Sherrington

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The family name of Charles Scott Sherrington, a British neurophysiologist who made pioneering discoveries about nerve impulses and synapses
2. A surname most famously borne by the 20th-century British scientist who advanced understanding of how the nervous system coordinates movement and sensation
3. The name of the distinguished neurophysiologist whose work on neural integration fundamentally shaped modern neuroscience

Etymology: Sherrington is a place name, not a common word, and its story is one of a personal name becoming a settlement. The first element is the Old English personal name Sċīra, built on sċīr, meaning "bright" or "shining." To this was added the suffix -ing, meaning "belonging to" or "the people of," and then tūn, meaning "enclosure" or "settlement." The sense is roughly "the farmstead of Sċīra's people," a pattern found in many English place names of the Anglo-Saxon period. Because the name was attached to a settlement rather than a person, the personal name itself faded from ordinary use while the place name survived. Sherrington is therefore a fossil of a forgotten Anglo-Saxon name, preserved on the map long after the individual it honoured was gone from memory.