Cathays Cathays Cathays ( ; (Welsh: usually "Cathays" but also "Y Waun Ddyfal") is a district and community in the centre of Cardiff, capital of Wales. It is an old suburb of Cardiff established in 1875. It is very densely populated and contains many older terraced houses giving it a Victorian era atmosphere. The area falls into the Cathays ward. The name is likely to be 'hedges/enclosure where there are wildcats' from Middle English cat(t), connoting possibly given the semi-agricultural, semi-forest nature of the area at the time wildcat rather than domesticated cats, and the plural form of hague/hay, meaning 'enclosure',
Splott medieval times, and a derivation of "plat", meaning a grassy area of land. The name of the original farm would seem to be Middle English "splott", from Old English (speck, blot, patch of land) and the word is to be found in other English place names in the Vale of Glamorgan, Gower, and Pembrokeshire, as well as in Somerset and Devon, in the West Country of England, from where it was presumably introduced by English settlers. It has frequently been noted on lists of unusual place names. The population of Splott in the United Kingdom Census 2001 was 12,074, in