Vol. 48 No. 3 (2000)
Research Article

The Oregon File of the Geographic Names Information System: A Macro Corpus Typology

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  • Lewis L. McArthur
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1179/nam.2000.48.3-4.227

Published 2000-12-01

Copyright (c) 2000 Maney

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

Abstract

The Oregon file of the national Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), containing some 51,500 geographic names, is being classified by type. The first part of this article discusses approximately 9,000 of these names, about which many basic facts are known and have been recorded. The second part covers a few general suppositions about various kinds of names, and discusses how certain of these suppositions compare statistically with the researched corpus. It concludes with some comments on name classification problems and suggestions as to how a large-scale study could be of use to various disciplines.

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References

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