Hydronym
proper name of a body of water
A hydronym (from Greek: ὕδρω, hydrō, "water" and ὄνομα, onoma, "name") is a type of toponym that designates a proper name of a body of water. Hydronyms include the proper names of rivers and streams, lakes and ponds, swamps and marshes, seas and oceans. For example, the hydronym of the easternmost lake of the Great Lakes is Lake Ontario. As a subset of toponymy, a distinctive discipline of hydronymy (or hydronomastics) studies the proper names of all bodies of water, the origins and meanings of those names, and their development and transmission through history.
Classification by water types
Within the onomastic classification, main types of hydronyms are (in alphabetical order):
helonyms: proper names of swamps, marshes and bogs
limnonyms: proper names of lakes and ponds
oceanonyms: proper names of oceans
potamonyms: proper names of rivers and streams
thalassonyms or, less commonly, pelagonyms: proper names of seas and maritime bays
Linguistic phenomena
Often, a given body of water will have several entirely different names given to it by different peoples living along its shores. For example, Tibetan: རྫ་ཆུ, Wylie: rDza chu, ZWPY: Za qu and Thai: แม่น้ำโขง [mɛ̂ː náːm kʰǒːŋ] are the Tibetan and Thai names, respectively, for the same river, the Mekong in southeast Asia. (The Tibetan name is used for three other rivers as well.)
Hydronyms from various languages may all share a common etymology. For example, the Danube, Don, Dniester, Dnieper, and Donets rivers all contain the Scythian name for "river" (cf. don, "river, water" in modern Ossetic). A similar suggestion is that the Yarden, Yarkon, and Yarmouk (and possibly, with distortion, Yabbok and/or Arnon) rivers in the Israel/Jordan area contain the Egyptian word for river (itrw, transliterated in the Bible as ye'or).
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q932103. The Library of Congress control number is sh85063480. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hydronym” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.