Humber - Etymology

Etymology

This river's name is recorded in Anglo-Saxon times as Humbre (Anglo-Saxon ) and Humbri (Vulgar Latin dative) / Umbri (Classical Latin dative) . The Latin name Abus (probably from Latin verb Abdo which means to cover with shadows) has the meaning of black/dark river . The successive name Humbre/Humbri/Umbri could continue to have the same meaning; in fact, the Latin verb umbro means, once again, to cover with shadows with the sense of black/dark river. Another hypothesis is: since its name recurs in the name of the "Humber Brook" near "Humber Court" in Herefordshire or Worcestershire, the word humbr- may have been a word that meant "river", or something similar, in an aboriginal language that had been spoken in England before the Celts migrated there (compare Tardebigge). An element *ambri- 'channel, river' is reconstructible for proto-Celtic and the Ancient Celtic prefix *su- 'good' routinely developed into Welsh *hy-.

The Humber features regularly in Geoffrey of Monmouth's 12th-century fictional chronicle Historia Regum Britanniae. According to Geoffrey, the Humber, invariably referred to by the Latin word for river, was named after "Humber the Hun" who drowned there while trying to invade in the earliest days of Britain's settlement.

The Humber was once known as the Abus, for example in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene.