Kemi.
Kemi (a town and municipality of Lapland, Finland, near the border with Sweden)
Meaning & usage
Kemi (a town and municipality of Lapland, Finland, near the border with Sweden)
Kem (a town in Republic of Karelia, Russia) (often qualified as Vienan Kemi)
a Finnish surname
Where this word comes from
At least in Finland, originally the name of the river (Kemijoki). The place name in Finland at least has traditionally been derived from the archaic Finnish term kemi (“dry, poor meadow; quite barren land with dry and relatively thin soil”). Heikkilä (2014) disputes this etymology, and instead argues that the name is rather, like Kymi (as Heikkilä argues), ultimately from Proto-Germanic *kwēmijaz (“easily accessible or passable”); the form Kemi would be derived via a Sami language. Rahkonen (2013) on the other hand associates the names with Proto-Finno-Permic *käme, which may have been borrowed through a Uralic substrate language. The surname derives from place names, or separately from the aforementioned kemi (which, if not the origin of the proper noun, is likely of the same origin anyway). Early attestations of the place name include Kijm (1386), Kym (1443), Kem sokn (1445).
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.