Patrick Sims-Williams is Professor of Celtic Studies in the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and was formerly Reader in Celtic and Anglo-Saxon in the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Religion and Literature in Western England, 600-800 (1990), Britain and Early Christian Europe (1995), and The Celtic Inscriptions of Britain: Phonology and Chronology, c. 400-1200 (2003). He is a co-editor of Ptolemy: Towards a Linguistic Atlas of the Earliest Celtic Place-Names of Europe (2000) and New Approaches to Celtic Place-Names in Ptolemy’s Geography (2005), and he edits Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies. He has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 1996.

"Taken as a whole, this book is a triumphant vindication of the value of philology applied in a systematic and discerning fashion to a major historical problem." Antiquity

• List of maps. Preface.1. Introduction.2. A Database Approach.3. The Long Arm of Coincidence.4. Selected Celtic-Looking Strings and Elements.5. The distribution of the Selected Celtic-Looking Elements.6. The Extent of Celtic Names: i. Northern Europe (above 48 latitude) .7. The Extent of Celtic Names: ii. Central Europe (latitudes 44-47).8. The Extent of Celtic Names: iii. Southern Europe (latitude 43 and southwar.9. The Extent of Celtic Names: iv. Asia Minor (west of longitude +35) with v. Note on Remaining Areas around the Mediterranean (north of latitude 35 and west of longitude +35).10. The Extent of Celtic Names: vi. Africa and Asia (south of latitude 35 and east of longitude +35).11. The Extent of Celtic Names: Summary.12. Prospects for Further Research.Abbreviations.Bibliography.Index of Place-Names