Uffington

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A village in Oxfordshire, England, known for the nearby white horse figure carved into the chalk hillside
2. A place name in southern England referring to a village near an ancient chalk figure of a white horse on the downs
3. An Oxfordshire village whose name is tied to the famous prehistoric white horse cut into the nearby chalk hill

Etymology: Uffington is a village whose name records a family, not a famous person. Its first element is "Uffa," a personal name, and the Old English suffix "-ing" meant "belonging to" or "the people of," so the name is roughly "the estate of Uffa's people." The final element, "tun," meant an enclosure or farmstead and later came to mean a town. The name is therefore a compact record of early settlement: a leader's household, claiming land and building a homestead. The first element is a variant of "Æffa," a king of the Angles around 575. Similar names survive in places such as Effingham, Abridge, and Ufford, which suggests a shared personal name spread across England. Whether the name itself has a deeper origin is uncertain, and the personal name's own meaning is not known.