A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1467 entries
oronym
An oronym is the name of a mountain, a hill, or a range. It is a subcategory of place names worth having its own word because mountain names behave differently from settlement names: They are often descriptive rather than commemorative, they are frequently duplicated across a region, and in many places the name known to the people living below the mountain is not the one on the map.
Etymology
The word is built from the Greek for mountain and the Greek for name, on the same pattern as hydronym for a water name and toponym for a place name generally, both on this site. The same Greek root is behind orogeny, the making of mountains, and orography, the study of relief, which is why weather forecasts talk about orographic rainfall.