Great post by Claire on what she calls the “taxonomy of geographic names” — learn new and useful words like “toponym” (place name), “allonym” (one of two toponyms applied to a single feature, e.g. Istanbul/Constantinople) or “exonym” (place name in a foreign language, e.g., in English, “Moscow” for Moskva and “Florence” for Firenze). She points to this Glossary of Toponymic Terminology, from which these definitions no doubt are derived; that site has more, but much of it is mundane. (Does a glossary of geographic terms really need to define “alphabet?”)