Street name

In toponymic terminology, names of streets and roads are referred to as odonyms or hodonyms (from Ancient Greek ὁδός hodós 'road', and ὄνυμα ónuma 'name', i.e., the Doric and Aeolic form of ὄνομα ónoma 'name').

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was common when writing a two-part street name (especially in Britain) to link the two parts with a hyphen and not capitalise the generic (e.g. Broad-street, London-road).

A street name can also include a direction (the cardinal points east, west, north, south, or the quadrants NW, NE, SW, SE) especially in cities with a grid-numbering system.

For instance the city of Leeds, UK, provides that:[3] The etymology of a street name is sometimes very obvious, but at other times it might be obscure or even forgotten.

The Shambles, derived from the Anglo-Saxon term fleshammels ("meat shelves" in butchers' stalls), is a historical street name which still exists in various cities and towns around England.

[4] The unusual etymologies of quite a few street names in the United Kingdom are documented in Rude Britain, complete with photographs of local signage.

Examples are London's Haymarket; Barcelona's Carrer de Moles (Millstone Street), where the stonecutters used to have their shops; and Cannery Row in Monterey, California.

London's Crystal Palace Parade takes its name from a former exhibition centre that stood adjacent to it, destroyed by fire in 1936.

Two main reasons streets are renamed are: (1) to commemorate a person who lived or worked in that area (for example, Avenue Victor Hugo in Paris, where he resided); or (2) to associate a prominent street in a city after an admired major historical figure even with no specific connection to the locale (for example, René Lévesque Boulevard in Montreal, formerly Dorchester Boulevard).

Similarly, hundreds of roads in the United States were named with variations of Martin Luther King Jr., in the years after his 1968 assassination.

[8] There are public benefits to having easily understood systems of orderly street names, such as in sequences:[citation needed]

(Sassafras, Mulberry, High and Cedar have since been renamed to Race, Arch, Market [the main east–west street downtown] and South.)

For example, the Commissioners' Plan of 1811 for Manhattan provided for numbered streets running parallel to the minor axis of the island and numbered and lettered avenues running parallel to the long axis of the island, although many of the avenues have since been assigned names for at least part of their courses.

Even in communities not laid out on a grid, such as Arlington County, Virginia, a grid-based naming system is still sometimes used to give a semblance of order.

Sometimes streets are renamed to reflect a changing or previously unrecognized ethnic community or to honour politicians or local heroes.

In towns such as Geneva,[18] Brussels,[19] Namur[20] and Poznań[21] initiatives have recently been taken to name or rename more streets and other public spaces after women.

After the death of Francisco Franco, the Spanish transition to democracy gave Catalonia the status of an autonomous community, with Catalan as a co-official language.

The government body responsible for overseeing the enacting of the Charter of the French Language continues to press English-majority communities to further gallicise (francize) their street names (for example, what was once "Lakeshore Road" was changed to "Chemin Lakeshore" in the 1970s, with the Office québécois de la langue française pressuring a further change to "Chemin du Bord-du-Lac", completely calquing the English name into French).

City officials rushed the name change, without waiting the required one-year mourning period after Lévesque's death.

Many streets with royal and colonial names still remain in the Republic of Ireland, and local councils occasionally debate their removal.

[26] In 2019, Cork City Councillor Diarmaid Ó Cadhla painted over the name of "Victoria Road" and several others, and was charged with criminal damage.

He said that there were "about 80 or 90 streets named after criminals and aristocrats in our city, and in Victoria’s case a genocidal queen responsible for the murder and displacement of two million Irish people," referring to the Great Famine.

For instance Boulevard Charlemagne was retranslated from Karlemagnelaan to Karel de Grotelaan, and Rue du Beau Site in Ixelles from the literal Schoonzichtstraat to the more idiomatic Welgelegenstraat.

Occasionally there is confusion over which is the best translation, as is the case with the Chaussée de Waterloo in St-Gilles, Brussels, which is variously rendered as Waterlosesteenweg and Waterloosesteenweg.

In many cities in Alberta, new developments have only a few common street names, which are followed by variant types such as Boulevard, Drive, Crescent and Place.

The breaks are usually caused by limited access (one or two entrance) housing subdivisions, or other multi block land uses (schools, parks, industrial plants, and even farm fields in the outskirts of towns).

[citation needed] In Portland, Oregon, the Martin Luther King, Junior Boulevard is abbreviated to "MLK Jr.

An example of this form of shortening is the common reference of Hurontario Street in the Toronto suburb of Mississauga, as "Highway 10".

North Michigan Avenue, Chicago's most famous shopping street, is also occasionally referred to by that name, but is more commonly called the Magnificent Mile.

In the United Kingdom many towns will refer to their main thoroughfare as the High Street, and many of the ways leading off it will be suffixed "Road".