Toponymy in Cartography

The term "toponymy" originates from the Greek word "topos" meaning "place" and "ónoma" meaning "name". Thus, the term "toponymy" designates the "name of the place".

The designations given to the places, resulting from a free act that gathered consensus, are linked to historical facts, circumstances, professions, popular wisdoms, legends and tales, at the time, to life or even death.
The use of toponyms is undoubtedly the most used form by the citizen to refer to a given region, with greater or lesser dimension.

A list of names called toponiic repertoire which currently consists of more than 180,000 different records, in text or geographical position, divided into 101 distinct typologies. These various types are associated with the data model adopted and spatially to the various specific objects in the terrain to which they refer. As an example, it refers to the CAS9 type associated with a small cluster of houses or the name associated with a Geodesic Vertex with the code vg22.

Toponymy is thus a compilation covering the entire national territory with georeferenced toponyms, enabling the use by various official entities and serving as a basis, for example for census operations, projects of national interest, the preparation of administrative, fiscal, statistical, political or other documents. These data may also serve research purposes or merely associated with leisure activities, transmitting, in addition to geographical location, the idea that each toponym contains a cultural, social, religious or political meaning that says a lot about the people and regions of Portugal.

The study of national toponyms involves interdisciplinary research work in which it will be desirable to obtain the contributions of Linguistics, History, Archaeology and Geography.
From names that are repeated from north to south of the continental territory, case of "OUTEIRO" (about 600 times) or about 77.340 toponyms that exist only once, they all have a reason to exist, with their own origin.