Aberdovey or Aberdyfi?

Sooner or later everyone notices it. The village is signposted as Aberdyfi, but the railway station says Aberdovey, the golf club says Aberdovey, and half the guidebooks switch between the two within a single page. So which is right? The short answer is both — and the longer answer is a neat little lesson in how Wales and English have rubbed along for a few hundred years.

One place, two spellings

Aberdyfi and Aberdovey are the same village; there is no second place hiding anywhere. Aberdyfi is the Welsh name, and it does what Welsh place names so often do — it tells you exactly where you are. Aber means the mouth of a river, and Dyfi is the river itself, the one whose great estuary the village sits beside. Put them together and Aberdyfi means, simply and precisely, “the mouth of the Dyfi.”

Where “Aberdovey” came from

Aberdovey is the anglicised version, an English ear’s attempt at the Welsh. The river Dyfi was long written in English as the Dovey — you will still see “Dovey” on old maps and in names like the Dovey Yacht Club — and so Aberdyfi became Aberdovey. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when English dominated officialdom, the anglicised spelling was the one you saw on the station, the postmarks and the holiday posters. That is why so many long-established institutions still carry it.

Which should you use?

Today the Welsh form, Aberdyfi, is the official one: it is what you will see on the road signs, on current Ordnance Survey maps and in anything produced locally, reflecting the proper place of the Welsh language in modern Wales. Aberdovey remains in common, affectionate use, especially among long-time visitors and in the names of older businesses, and nobody will correct you for it. Use Aberdyfi and you are bang up to date; use Aberdovey and you are in good, traditional company. We answer to both, often in the same breath.

And how do you say it?

For the record: the Welsh Aberdyfi is roughly “aber-DUH-vee,” with that f sounding like an English v — one of the first small victories of reading Welsh, where f is “v” and ff is “f.” The anglicised Aberdovey lands in much the same place. Either way, you will be understood, and saying it at all puts you ahead of most.

If the names have whetted your appetite for the village’s stories, the legend of the drowned kingdom beneath the bay is the one to read next, and the rest of the place is in our things-to-do guide. The deeper history sits with the community council and the village’s own entry.