WHAT'S in a name? An entire history of County Durham, that's what.

And that history has at last been laid bare in a major place-name dictionary which will finally lay to rest pub debates on how Snotterton got its name, just where No Place is and why Quebec really is in County Durham.

Victor Watts, master at Grey College at Durham University, has used ancient documents at the university as part of his 40-year investigation on the county's place names.

The 63-year-old English lecturer and administrator has launched his limited edition County Durham dictionary that will be available in bookshops from Monday. And his much bigger work - a dictionary of 18,000 place names from across the whole of England - will be published in the coming weeks.

Given the scale of the task and the rigour of the lifetime academic it's no surprise that some of the Durham's more endearing myths are exploded in the dictionary. Romantics will be disappointed to learn that Brancepeth and Brandon near Durham City didn't really get their names from the legend of a mighty boar (or brawn) slain by an heroic knight.

Instead of 'brawn's path' the villages earned their names from a long-forgotten man called Brand.

Not that Mr Watts doesn't have his own personal favourites in his dictionary that covers the old, pre-1974 County Durham boundaries.

He said: "I'm pleased with all of them really but I like the names that aren't really what they might seem. For instance Bearpark near Durham is a corruption of Beaurepair or beautiful retreat.

"A Norman prior had his retreat there but the interesting thing is that Beaurepair was mentioned in a lot of secular literature at the time. I like to think he had read it.

"I also like Strother House near Boldon. It's intriguing because Chaucer takes the mickey out of the north accent in the Reeve's Tale and mentions a Strother 'far in the north.' But I like all the names really."

Mr Watts first became interested in place names after first moving to Durham in 1962 when he discovered the university's archives. He agreed that place names could give an insight for historians.

The county's oldest name is Deerness, a pre-Celtic name for the river that could date to the second century BC. Very few Celtic names survived the Anglo-Saxon invasions and the Vikings only made inroads, at least in the name-giving stakes, up to the southern part of the county.

Not that modest Mr Watts, who is an honorary director of The English Place-Name Society which is publishing the book and an editor of the Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names, spends too much time on theories. His is a scholarly dictionary and does not pretend to cover every single name in the county.

The book, which is expected to cost £11.99, will be available from a limited number of shops or from writing to the English Place-Name Society, School of English Studies, University of Nottingham, Nottingham