NOTES ON LOCAL ETYMOLOGIES. 
41 
nothing to do either with the river or with a battle presumed to 
have been fought upon its banks. 
Nor do I believe in the Plym. The oldest form of the word is 
not Plym, but Plyw, and "lin" is the Kornu lyn, a "lake" (not 
the Saxon hlynn, a "stream," which we have in the Lyn river). 
The estuary of the St. Germans river is the Lyn-lier, or "long 
lake; " and the P in Plyn may stand for pen, and thus give us the 
"head lake," or "head of the lake," if, as is possible, Plympton is 
the older word. In Domesday we find " Plintona," not "Plymp- 
tona;" while Plymouth, then, had never been heard of. The 
oldest form of Plymouth is PZ«miouth, a word which in the course 
of time would by necessity of speech be converted into Plymouth. 
That once done, and the older use of the name forgotten, the 
inference that Plymouth stood at the mouth of the Plym river and 
not at the mouth of the Plin estuary would be irresistible. We 
hud both Pelyn and Pelynt actually in use in Cornwall at the 
present day, and both pronounced as monosyllables. Mr. J. 
Brooking Eowe, rightly arguing against the idea that the river as 
such gave name to Plympton, was inclined to regard the prefix as 
a clan name, and to find it also in PlymtTee and allied names else- 
where. In Plymtree, however, I believe we have simply Plumtree ; 
as we have " Longtree " in Langtree, "Appletree" in Appledore, 
" Crab tree " in Crabtree, " Hive " or " Hightree " in Heavitree. In 
neither of these cases is the " tree " the well-known Kornu particle, 
which is never used as a suffix. 
What, then, is the original name of the Plym % I believe that 
Laira and Plym have been exchanged. It is quite true that Liar 
is "overspreading" in Kymric, which, with ivy or gy, "water," 
would very well apply to the Laira as it is ; or we may take the 
Kornu le, a "place," and ryn, a "channel." I have come to the 
conclusion, however, that the Laira is the true river name. 
Chappie, nearly a century since, suggested that Meavy came from 
mwy, "enlarged or augmented water." Mui means "greater" in 
Kornu. The y, with which the names of so many of our smaller 
rivers end, may be either the Kymric ivy, Kornu gy, or Saxon ea 
(whence "Yeo"), each of which simply means water. I do not 
regard it as a diminutive. Meavy thus would be "the greater 
water." What, then, is Laira % This is a very modern form of a 
word which first appears as Lery. Le is Kornu for "lesser;" and 
as Penlee is "the lesser headland" (Pryce) in contrast with the 
