b east west

This map shows places with names beginning "West" and "East".

The diagram below shows the differences between the eastings and between the northings for places with

names beginning "East" and beginning "West". Ideally, if two places are separated by a greater East-West

distance than their North-South distance, they would be called "East ----" and "West ----" rather than

"North ----" and "South ----". These places would lie to the right of the two sloping red lines.

The inverted histogram at the top shows the differences between the E-W and N-S coordinates for pairs

of places. They should always be positive. Given that the OS Open Data are given as the centres of the

containing 1 km squares rather than as exact values, the data are mainly compatilble with this idea.

There is no obvious North-South bias. The mean separation of pairs of places is about 1.58 km, with an RMS

deviation of about 1.02 km. The circles in the diagram have had a random amount with a range of +- 0.5 km

added to their X and Y coordinates to break the degeneracy.

The diagram below includes both North-South pairs and East-West pairs. The histogram of distances, with

1 km bins, shows that most of the distances between the pairs of places are less than 2.5 km