Winton

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A small outback town in western Queensland, Australia, known as a gateway to dinosaur fossil sites ; a family name, borne notably by Nicholas Winton, the British humanitarian who rescued children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia
2. An inland settlement in central Queensland, Australia, set in the Outback ; a surname carried by people such as Nicholas Winton, the British aid worker famed for saving Czech children before the Second World War
3. A remote Australian town in the Queensland outback ; a surname, most famously that of Nicholas Winton, the British rescuer of hundreds of Jewish children from Czechoslovakia

Etymology: "Winton" is a place name, not a common word, and its origin lies in the Old English settlements that gave rise to many English towns. It comes from either the Old English personal name Wine, a byname drawn from wine meaning "friend," or from winn, meaning "pasture," combined with tūn, meaning "enclosure" or "settlement." Tūn is the ancestor of modern "town," which once meant simply a fenced farmstead or homestead rather than a large urban centre. Both proposed sources are plausible, and the two readings lead to slightly different pictures. On the first, the place was named for an early landholder called Wine, so "Winton" would mean something like "Wine's settlement." On the second, it describes a place of grazing land, "pasture enclosure." The evidence does not settle the matter definitively, so the name can be read either way, though both explanations share the same ending: a settlement built around a farmstead.