English Place-name Society

Survey of English Place-Names

A county-by-county guide to the linguistic origins of England’s place-names – a project of the English Place-Name Society, founded 1923.

Clent

Major Settlement in the Parish of Clent

Historical Forms

  • Clent 11th Heming 1086 DB 1186 P 1258 Pat

Etymology

This name is difficult. There is a ME  clint , 'hard flinty rock,' a Scandinavian loan-word which has its origin in Dan , Sw  klint , but this cannot be the source of clent in England, with its persistent e and further, as a Worcestershire place-name of the 11th cent., and almost certainly of far earlier date, it can hardly be Scandinavian at all. In the North Frisian dialects we have in place-names the forms klant , klent and klunt (Schmidt- Petersen, Die Orts - und Flurnamen Nordfrieslands 40). The first two go back to a Germanic klent which is the source of Danish klint and which, had it been found in OE , would have given klint . The third form goes back to a Germanic klant which, in the forms klant , klatt (all with the same sense) is found in modern Norwegian (Torp, Nynorsk Etym . Ordbog s. v .), and suggest that klant was a common Germanic form showing a different grade of the same stem. There may have been an i –noun formed from this grade in OE, giving a lost OE  clent , 'rock,' a suitable name for a hill. The word clent in this sense is found once in a ME text in the phrase 'a clent hille'. The NED (s. v .) suggests that this is allied to clint , if not the same word. The text is a northern one so that it may be that we have an isolated bad spelling for the Scandinavian word but it does not seem very probable.