WHAT'S IN A NAME?

 Reading is a town in Berkshire, England, 38 miles west of London.

Only that Reading is not "read" as in reading but "red-ing" as in "Red light"
Berkshire is not "Berk" neither is it "Shayar(as in poet)", it is "Bark" (as in bhow bhow by kutta) and Shire as in "shirt"

In England, a shire is a traditional term for a county.
For example
Yorkshire: The shire administered from York.
Lancashire: The shire administered from Lancaster.
Oxfordshire: The shire administered from Oxford.
Gloucestershire: The shire administered from Gloucester.
Bedfordshire: The shire administered from Bedford
Hampshire: The shire administered from Southampton (Historically "Hamtun")
Out of the 39 historic counties of England, more than half use this suffix.

So where is the "Berk" of Berkshire county?

Unlike Yorkshire (York) or Oxfordshire (Oxford), there is no town or city called "Berk."

Instead, the "Berk" in Berkshire comes from a physical, geographic feature of the landscape that dates back more than 1,100 years. It is an etymological evolution of a Celtic and Anglo-Saxon description for a specific type of forest.

The ancient Celtic word for boxwood or a hilly forest was "Bearroc" (meaning "hilly place" or "abounding in box trees"). When the Anglo-Saxons settled the region, they took the old Celtic name and added their own word for district (scir / shire). Bearroc-scir gradually evolved over centuries into Berkshire.

So, when you say Berkshire, you are literally saying "The Boxwood Forest County". To make things a bit more confusing, even though it is spelled "Berk-shire," the British completely ignore the 'e' and pronounce it "Bark-sher"

In 1957, Queen Elizabeth II officially designated it as the Royal County of Berkshire because it is home to Windsor Castle, the ancestral palace of the royal family.

BUT WAIT..................

Wiltshire: The shire administered from Salisbury. (Not Sal-is-bury but Sauls-bree)
The shire gets its name from a small town called Wilton (originally Wilsætan, meaning the "settlers on the River Wylye").

So why is it not called Saliburyshire?🤔

When the Anglo-Saxon kings were first carving England up into shires during the 800s and 900s, Wilton was the undisputed powerhouse of the region.

It was the capital of the local kingdom of Wessex. It was a massive trading hub and the site of a wealthy, influential royal abbey. Because it was the administrative heart where the King's officials sat, the surrounding district naturally became Wilton-shire.

At that time, modern Salisbury did not even exist.

If the county lines had been drawn in the year 1300, it almost certainly would have been called Salisburyshire.

But because the administrative borders were locked in during the 900s when Wilton was king, the name remained frozen in time—even though the actual center of power packed up and moved a few miles down the road to Salisbury a few centuries later.

There’s a colloquial term “I live in the shires” meaning to live in the countryside. One county vanished completely, absorbed into the growing Greater London - Middlesex. That is why Middlesex has county cricket located in London's historic Lords Cricket Ground and football team while "Londonshire" doesnt have one. Middlesex exists while "Londonshire" never existed. London Predates the Shires by Centuries since the Romans founded it as Londinium in 43 AD.

One of my favorite writers, Len Deighton (Who passed away recently), had this to say (and I quote from memory) - We persist in following incomprehensible naming conventions so that when foreigners mispronounce them, we can laugh at them!