Sweden: Ortnamnsregistret

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Ortnamnsregistret is a free, online gazetteer provided by Institutet för språk och folkminnen (The Institute of Language and People's Heritage). It is a great reference to find Swedish place names, whether old or new, residential or landscape. Searches can be made by county or for the entire country. The URL is https://www.isof.se/sprak/namn/ortnamn/ortnamnsregistret/sok-i-registret.html.

Searching the Entire Index
To search the entire index, click on the link Sök i hela Ortnamsregistret. In the Ortnamn field enter the name you would like to search for. In the fields below you can choose which parish, district or county you would like to search. Here you can narrow your search area but it works great to search in an entire county or the entire country but it takes a little more time for it to come up on the computer.

You can search with a full name or you can use wildcards. An underscore (_) can be used to substitute one character and a percent sign (%) substitutes multiple characters in a word. With the use of the percent sign (%) a search can be made for part of the name - the beginning of a place name, or the ending of a place name. For example you can type in the search field Eke% and you will get all the place names that begin with Eke (Ekeby, Ekeberga, Ekehult, etc). You can type %sta and you will get all places which end with sta.

In the table below the search fields you can choose which categories of information you would like to search. Bebyggelsenamn refers to names of crofts, farms, villages, parishes, cities, etc. The category “Naturnamn” refers to landscape names such as lakes, mountains, mines, streams, etc.

Språk refers to the linguistic origin. If you choose, for example, the parish of Arjeplog and the language samiska, you will get all the Lappish place names in Arjeplogs parish. (Alla = all, Svenska = Swedish, Finska = Finnish, Samiska = Lappish). If you are uncertain choose alla.

Searching In a Specific County
On the homepage, click on the name of the county you would like to search and follow the procedure described above.

Search the Parish List
The Sök i Sockenlistan (search the parish list) link will open a form where you can enter the name, or parts of the name, of a parish and get a list of all the parishes with their associated härad (district) and län (county).

Clicking on the name of a parish will return a list of places within the parish. Likewise, clicking on the name of a district will return a list of all the parishes in that district.