Abstract
ALTHOUGH it appears from earlier letters1 that no definite agreement can be reached about the pronunciation of Joule, the following points may be of interest concerning a possible origin of the name and of its different pronunciations. According to A. Schuster and A. E. Shipley2: “Joule's name appears to be derived from Youlgrave, a village in Derbyshire where his family originally resided”. It would, perhaps, be more correct to say that both Joule and Youlgrave had a common origin, the former in the English or Scandinavian personal name Iola the place-name then meaning Iola's grove. A. Mawor and F. M. Stenton3 give this meaning, though E. Ekwall4 suggests instead, yellow grove.
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NATURE, 152, 354, 418, 479 (1943).
Schuster, A., and Shipley, A. E., "Britain's Heritage of Science" (second edit., 1920), 40.
Mawer, A., and Stenton, F. M., "Introduction to the Survey of English Place-Names" (1924), 104.
Ekwall, E., "The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names" (1936).
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WEBB, K. James Prescott Joule and the Unit of Energy. Nature 152, 602 (1943). https://doi.org/10.1038/152602a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/152602a0
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