Chișinău

Chișinău Etymology and namesThe origin of the city's name is unclear, but in one version, the name comes from the archaic Romanian word chișla (meaning "spring", "source of water") and nouă ("new"), because it was built around a small spring, at the corner of Pușkin and Albișoara streets.The other version, formulated by Ștefan Ciobanu, Romanian historian and academician, holds that the name was formed the same way as the name of Chișineu (alternative spelling: Chișinău) in Western Romania, near the border with Hungary. Its Hungarian name is Kisjenő, from which the Romanian name originates. Kisjenő comes from kis "small" and the "Jenő", one of the seven Hungarian tribes that entered the Carpathian Basin in 896. At least 24 other settlements are named after the "Jenő" tribe.Chișinău is known in Russian as Кишинёв. It is written Kişinöv in the Latin Gagauz alphabet. It was also written as "Chișineu" in pre-20th-century Romanian and as "Кишинэу" in the Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet. Historically, the English language name for the city, "Kishinev", was based on the modified Russian one because it entered the English language via Russian at the time Chișinău was part of the Russian Empire (e.g. Kishinev pogrom)(which, starting with the 16th century fell under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire). At the beginning of the 19th century Chișinău was a small town of 7,000 inhabitants.