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 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 lies in County Durham.

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

Mr Watts, 63, has now launched his limited edition County Durham dictionary.

His much bigger work - a dictionary of 18,000 place names from across the whole of England - will be published shortly.

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 did not 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 some long forgotten man called Brand.

Not that the lecturer in English does not 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, who first became interested in place names after moving to Durham in 1962 when he discovered the university's archives, said place names gave important insights to 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.

Mr Watts 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.

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