In her work the author presents the name giving habits and the use of names as reflected by medieval oronyms. Special attention is given to the possible benefits of the study of oronyms for onomastic research and its related fields, such as history.

The book consists of three basic units. The subchapters of the first part deal with theoretical questions that emerged during the examination of oronyms. First of all, the author reviews those differences between the toponym types which are significant from the point of view of linguistics and history. She also mentions difficulties in defining the term oronym. If the cognitive linguistc approach is used, it becomes quite obvious that the ground elevations referred to as mountains by the name users can be diverse surface forms. Therefore, the author uses the term oronym in its broadest sense, extending it to any surface elevations labelled mountains by the speakers to give them a proper name value. What makes the collection of medieval Hungarian oronyms problematic is the difficulty in defining the length of words in the Latin texts. To overcome this difficulty, apart from disclosing name-using habits, it is necessary to examine the names as elements of the onomatosystem, and as parts of the charter that contains their data. Furthermore, the later data on the occurrence of the names can also be of help. The author reviews the relationship between oronyms and other toponym types as the end of the theoretical section.

Geographical common words that are components of such names can be put to good use in onomastic studies and historical dialectology because they can be easily localized in space and time. In the second part of the work, the author surveys orographic common words with regard to their etymological and semantic features, referring to their relevance for linguistic geography and discussing their loadedness as name-forming elements.

In the closing, third chapter, the typological analysis of medieval oronyms is conducted on the basis of the semantic content and lexical-morphological structure of the names, proceeding to aspects of their historical genesis. The most frequently occurring structure is “name constituent expressing a peculiar feature + orographic common word” (Kerek-domb ‘round hill’). The first member of compounds is most often a toponym (Dorog-hegy < Dorog settlement name + hegy ‘mountain’) or an anthrophonym (Gyula halma < Gyula anthrophonym + halom ‘mound’). There are also a considerable number of oronyms taken from other languages. Hungarian speakers often used these in structurally unaltered forms such as Papaj of Slavic origin (< Ptoto-Slavic *popelъ ‘ash’). Typological analyses of toponyms can also be useful for the history of the given population. To support this point, the author presents the different linguistic and chronological layers in the medieval stock of names of two adjacent North Hungarian mountains.