Recently I’ve been working out of my girlfriend’s business school library, which is situated in a neighborhood of London called Marylebone. Like the names of many British places, it’s pronounced completely differently than its spelling would suggest: mar-lee-bone.



The hood, it turns out, was named for a church. From Wikipedia:

Marylebone gets its name from a church dedicated to St Mary. The original church was built on the bank of a small stream or “bourne”, called the Tybourne or Tyburn. The church and the surrounding area later became known as St Mary at the Bourne which, over time, became shortened to its present form, Marylebone.



As for bourne, it traces its way back to the Proto-Indo-European root “*bhreue- ‘to boil, bubble, effervesce, burn’” (Online Etymology Dictionary), which eventually stemmed off into both brew, which fits nicely, and Old English brunna, meaning brook or stream.

(photo source)

Update (2014-09-18) - read the comment threads on Reddit: