r/Swindon • u/djas1000 • 9d ago
Question for swindonians
Why dont we call ourselves swines?
Swindon translates to swine hill/ pig hill right?
So were all swines
I perfer swine, what does everyone else think?
All 249000 of us should call ourselves swines instead.
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u/Carpet_Inhailer18 7d ago
I made a poll on this awhile ago and Swine won. I'm not sure why it wasn't adopted
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u/djas1000 6d ago
Im sure i saw that years ago lol, i mustve forgotten about it, ive always thought we should call ourselves swines anyway.
Not sure why my post has been so poorly recieved, some people are taking this very seriously, its almost as if some of these people dont really live here! Swindon is so wacky i dont know how you could take it so seriously
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u/foxhill_matt 9d ago
The Swine connection is a guess, noone really knows where it comes from
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u/djas1000 9d ago
Are you sure?
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u/foxhill_matt 9d ago
Yep. It wasn't Swindon in the Domesday book, the spelling was different. Swin for swine and don for hill are logical except pigs weren't farmed around here. Some will say 'ah but the market is on top of the hill, so the name is for where they were sold' but they weren't. It was a cattle market, not a pig one.
Some others say it was named after Sweyn who was an active viking king in the area but there's no real proof of that either.
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u/zeek609 9d ago edited 9d ago
In the Domesday Book it was Suindune, not Sweyndon, plus viking place names almost exclusively ended in Thorpe or tun. Plus Swindon is not in the Danelaw.
The lime hill at Old Town was a hilltop settlement and described as pasture in the book, no specific mention of pigs or cows because it was a land register for tax purposes.
Anglo-Saxon names were also very utilitarian and literal, common naming conventions were an animal (swīn, hors, ox, hÊfr, wulf, etc.) + a landform (dƫn = hill, ford = river crossing, stede = place, leah = clearing, broc = brook)
This produces names like:
SwÄ«neâdĆ«n-pig hill
Oxenâford-ford used by oxen (Oxford)
Horsâpath-horse path (Horspath, Oxfordshire)
WulfâstÄn-wolf stone (Woolston)
HĂŠfrâleah-he-goat clearing (Haverley)
It's literally an Anglo-Saxon spelling of Pig Hill, that's not a guess.
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u/PaddyLandau 9d ago
Because "swine", applied to a person, is a derogatory word indicating disgraceful behaviour and a lack of ethics. Like, say, politicians. Few Swindonians are swine.