Fellow Canadians! How many " tons" are there in Ontario? Such as Hamilton, Burlington, Kingston, Wiarton etc.?

Brampton

Burlington

Hamilton

Kingston

Wiarton

I doubt if anyone has ever added them up. There is no reason to do so, aside from curiosity. If I wanted to know how many there were, which I don't, I'd go through the list of Ontario towns and cities in my road atlas and count them up.

The term "ton" in a city or town's name comes from Old English, meaning estate or homestead. They in turn took the term from a Germanic word called "tun". It is where the word "town" is derived from.

So a place like Kingston literally means "The king's estate" or "The king's town".

Ever notice many names of places and people are like that? In French, many last names start with "du" or "des" which means "from" or "of". So you have Dufresne, Deschanel, and so on. In Russia, many of their names end with "ov" which translates to "son of" (Karpov, Nemchinov, Kozlov).

So it is really no surprise that many cities and towns will end in -ton. Especially ones that originated from an English settlement.