Torpenhow Hill ( ) is claimed to be the name of a hill near the village of Torpenhow in Cumbria, England. The name is tautological. According to an analysis by linguist Darryl Francis and locals, there is no landform formally known as Torpenhow Hill there, either officially or locally, which would make the term an example of a ghost word.
A. D. Mills in his Dictionary of English Place-Names interprets the name as "Ridge of the hill with a rocky peak", giving its etymology as Old English , Celtic , and Old English , each of which mean . Thus, the name Torpenhow Hill could be interpreted as .
In 1688, Thomas Denton stated that Torpenhow Hall and church stand on a , which he assumed might have been the source of the name of the village.English Place Name Society, 1950, The Place-names of Cumberland, p. 326.Thomas Denton: A Perambulation of Cumberland, 1687–1688, including descriptions of Westmorland, the Isle of Man and Ireland. Denton apparently exaggerated the example to a "Torpenhow Hill", which would quadruple the "hill" element, but the existence of a toponym "Torpenhow Hill" is not substantiated.
In 1884, G. L. Fenton proposed the name as an example of "quadruple redundancy" in tautological place name etymologies, i.e. that all four elements of the name might mean "hill". It was used as a convenient example for the nature of loanword adoption by Thomas Comber around 1880."...the name thus meaning in reality hill-hill-hill-hill. Fortunately the Normans let it remain, and we are spared from having to call the place 'Torpenhow hill-mount'." Thomas Comber, "The Origin of the English Names of Plants", The Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society, Volume 15 (1904), p. 616.
See also List of tautological place names Cumbrian toponymy
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