Sweden: Ortnamnsregistret

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Ortnamnsregistret is an online gazetteer provided by Språkrådet (the Institute of Language and Peoples 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. It is a free website.

Web address: http://www2.sofi.se/SOFIU/topo1951/_cdweb/index.htm

Searching the Entire Index

To search the entire index, click on the link “Sök I hela Ortnamsregistret”.In the field “Ortnamn” 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”.

Click on search and wait. The search can sometimes take a little time, so be patient.

Searching a specific county

Click on the county you would like to search and follow the procedure above for searching the entire index.

“Sök i Sockenlistan”(search the parish list) will give you a list of all the parishes in Sweden.

By entering in the name of a parish and clicking on search, a list of smaller places within the parish may be obtained.