Wroxeter

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A former Roman city in Shropshire, England, once known as Viroconium and now best known for its excavated ruins
2. An ancient Roman settlement in the English county of Shropshire whose remains survive as an archaeological site
3. The name of a Roman town in western England, located in Shropshire, whose ruins are preserved as a historic site

Etymology: Wroxeter is a village in Shropshire, England, and its name is a long chain of renaming. The Romans called the town Viroconium, and that Latin name came from a Celtic word spoken by the Britons who lived there before them, reconstructed as "Wirokū" in Early Brythonic, with roots in the older Proto-Celtic "Wirokū." The name itself seems to mean something like "the place of the men" or "the great ones," though the exact sense is uncertain. When Anglo-Saxon settlers arrived and the Roman town lay in ruins, they kept the old name but reshaped it to fit their own speech. They combined it with "ceaster," their word for a fortress or town, which descends from the Latin "castra," meaning camp. The Old English form was something like "Wreocencæster," attested in the name of the local people, the Wreocensæte, who gave the district its identity. Over the Middle English period, the name shrank and blurred into the Wroxeter we know today.