A ford created or improved by human effort; a crossing point at a river made passable by work.
From Old English ef- (again, repeatedly) + ford (river crossing). A place-name element in English geography, as in 'Offer' or other '-ford' place names with effort-based modifications.
Place names are linguistic fossils—'efford' survives mainly as a surname and location name because people stopped using the phrase but kept saying the place, freezing the old word in geography.
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