River Mole in 1613. In John Speed's 1611 map of Surrey this stretch of the river is denoted by a series of hills accompanied by the legend "The river runneth under". However the river's name is unlikely to have derived from this behaviour: The "Oxford Dictionary of English Place Names" suggests that "Mole" either comes from the Latin "mola" (a mill) or is a back-formation from "Molesey" (Mul's island). In John Rocque's 1768 map of Surrey, the name "Moulsey River" is used. In common with much of the rest of the Weald, the earliest evidence of human settlement along the Upper Mole
Mole (animal) shrew-moles differ from the common definition of "mole". In Middle English, moles were known as "moldwarp". The expression "don't make a mountain out of a mole hill" – exaggerating problems – was first recorded in Tudor times. By the era of Early Modern English, the mole was also known in English as "mouldywarp", a word having cognates in other Germanic languages such as German ("Maulwurf"), and Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and Icelandic ("muldvarp", "mullvad", "moldvarpa"), where the "muld/mull/mold" part of the word means soil and the "varp/vad/varpa" part means throw, hence "one who throws soil" or "dirt tosser". Male moles are