Toponymy (топонімія; toponimiia). The study of place-names or toponyms, sometimes called toponomastics. Crossed by many migratory peoples in the 1st millennium AD, Ukraine is an important region for the study of hydronyms—names of rivers and other bodies of water. Hydronyms change much less than other toponyms and therefore better reflect ethnohistorical changes. The data for Ukrainian hydronymy are found in P. Mashtakov’s Russian registers of rivers in the Dnipro River basin (1913), the Dnister River and Boh River basins (1917), and Don River basin (1934); in H. Shvets, N. Drozd, and Serhii Levchenko’s catalog of Ukraine’s rivers (1957), which is unfortunately very Russified; and in Wörterbuch der russischen Gewässernamen (1960–73), edited by Max Vasmer.

The linguistic study of Ukraine’s hydronyms began only after the Second World War. The Institute of Linguistics of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR began work on a hydronymic atlas in 1960, and in 1979 it published a dictionary of over 20,000 of Ukraine’s hydronyms (with 24,000 variants) edited by A. Nepokupny, O. Stryzhak, and Kyrylo Tsiluiko. Monographs have been written by J. Rozwadowski (on Slavic hydronyms [1948]), O. Stryzhak (river names of Poltava oblast [1963] and of Zaporizhia oblast and Kherson oblast on the lower Dnipro River’s Left Bank [1967]), I. Muromtsev (word-forming types of hydronyms in the Donets River basin [1966]), Oleg Trubachev (river names of Right-Bank Ukraine [1968] and, with V. Toporov, a linguistic analysis of hydronyms of the upper Dnipro River basin [1962]), A. Korepanova (word-forming types of hydronyms in the lower Desna River basin [1969), Janusz Rieger (hydronyms of the Sian River basin [1969]), V. Loboda (toponyms of the Dnipro River–Boh River basins [1976]), Ye. Otin (hydronyms of eastern Ukraine [1977]), Zinoviia Franko (the grammatical structure of Ukrainian hydronyms [1979]), and L. Masenko (hydronyms of western Podilia [1979]). Yurii Karpenko edited a book on the hydronyms of the lower Dnister River basin (1981), and O. Stryzhak edited a book on the interlingual and interdialectal aspects of Ukrainian hydronyms (1981).

Hydronyms have been less subject to political manipulation and cultural fashion than names of mountains (oronyms) and inhabited places. In Russian-ruled Ukraine, the latter were Russified from the 18th century on. The ancient settlement Polovytsia, for example, became the city of Katerynoslav (Ekaterinoslav), named in honor of Catherine II, and in the Soviet period it was renamed Dnipropetrovsk in honor of the Bolshevik leader Hryhorii Petrovsky. Russian lexical forms, such as the suffix -sk, were imposed on many places. In Southern Ukraine, the late 18th-century Russian classicist vogue for things Hellenic resulted in such city names as Yevpatoriia (former Tatar, G’ozlev, Ukrainian Kozliv) and Kherson.

Monographs dealing wholly or partly with Ukrainian toponymy have been written by V. Chubenko (toponyms on the territory of the Donets Ridge [1939]), Jaroslav Rudnyckyj (toponyms of the Boiko region [1939; repr 1962]), Stefan Hrabec (toponyms of the Hutsul region [1950]), S. Rospond (a structural-grammatical classification of Slavic geographic names [1957], a work on Slavic place-names with the suffix -s’k [1969], and a stratigraphy of Slavic toponyms [1974]), A. de Vincenz (La toponymie des Carpates du Nord [1959]), Yurii Karpenko (toponyms of the mountain, central, and eastern raions of Chernivtsi oblast [1964–5] and toponyms of Bukovyna [1973]), V. Šmilauer (a handbook of Slavic toponomastics [1970]), V. Loboda (the interaction of the East Slavic languages in Ukrainian toponymy [1976]), Yu. Kruhliak (the origins of the names of Ukraine’s cities and towns [1978]), and O. Kupchynsky (the oldest Slavic toponyms of Ukraine as a source of historical and geographic research [1981]). Karpenko edited a book on toponyms in northeastern Odesa oblast (1975). Ukrainian toponyms outside Ukraine’s political borders are treated in books by Zdzisław Stieber (toponyms of the Lemko region [2 vols, 1948–9]), A. Yashchenko (toponyms in Kursk oblast [1958]), S. Warchoł (town names in the Lublin region [1964]), E. Pawłowski (place-names in the Nowy Sącz region [2 vols, 1971, 1975]), A. Yeremiia (Moldavian place-names [1970]), V. Prokhorov (a historical-toponymic dictionary of Voronezh oblast [1953]), and M. Kondratiuk (place-names in the southeastern Białystok region [1974] and Baltic elements in the toponyms and microtoponyms [names of uninhabited places] of the Białystok region [1985]). Books on microtoponyms have been written by Aleksei L. Petrov (mid-19th to early 20th-century Transcarpathia [1929]), Mykhailo Lesiv (the Lublin region [1972]), E. Pawłowski (the Nowy Sącz region [1984]), and E. Cherepanova (Chernihiv–Sumy Polisia [1984]). Max Vasmer’s Iranische Ortsnamen in Südrussland: Untersuchen über die ältesten Wohnsitze der Slaven (1923) is a valuable contribution on the linguistic substratum of Ukrainian toponymy. Toponyms of Kyivan Rus’ is the subject of E. Barsov’s geographic dictionary of 9th- to 14th-century Rus’ (1865) and of his book on the geography of the Primary Chronicle (1874; 2nd edn 1885), as also of V. Nerozniak’s book on the names of the ancient Rus’ cities (1983), and of the Ukrainian etymological dictionary of place-names in Southern Rus’ found in the Rus’ chronicles (1985), edited by O. Stryzhak. In the United States of America, Anna Vlasenko-Bojcun wrote a study of Ukrainian place-names in the United States (1977; English trans 1984), and S. Holutiak-Hallick Jr produced a Ukrainian toponymic atlas of the United States (1982).

Data on Ukrainian toponyms can be found in Yakiv Holovatsky’s geographic dictionary (1884); the geographic dictionary of the Polish Kingdom and other Slavic countries (15 vols, 1880–1904) edited by F. Sulimierski, W. Walewski, and B. Chlebowski; M. Yanko’s toponymic dictionary and handbook of Soviet Ukraine (1973); the Russian geographic dictionary (11 vols, 1964–88) edited by Max Vasmer and H. Bräuer; and M. Bodnarsky’s Ukrainian dictionary of geographic names (1955; rev edn 1959 adapted from the Russian). Lists of place-names in Ukraine by oblast and raion are found in reference books of the administrative territorial division of Soviet Ukraine (most recently published in 1973). Ukrainian textbooks on toponymy have been written by B. Bezvenglinsky (1938) and S. Babyshyn (1962). Interlingual toponymic concordances can be found in Jaroslav Rudnyckyj’s Ukrainian-German/German-Ukrainian dictionary of place-names (1943), A. Kara-Mosko and M. Tokarsky’s Russian-Ukrainian dictionary of geographic names (1953), H. Batowski’s dictionary of Central and East European place-name changes (1964), V. Nezhnypapa’s Ukrainian-Russian dictionary of geographic names in Soviet Ukraine (1964; rev edn 1971), and László Dezső’s monograph on the history of the Transcarpathian dialects (1967).

Roman Senkus, Bohdan Struminsky

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]