This chapter introduces the notions of toponymy and toponomastics (the study of toponyms, or place names), as well as the fundamentals in the field of toponymy, such as its sub-disciplines, e.g., hydronymy, oronymy, odonymy, and urbanonymy, and essential terminology, e.g., toponymic structures (or the generic and specific elements of a toponym), and toponymic system (i.e., a set of place names that belong to a specific area and share the same etymological stem and related meaning and/or the same naming process). The chapter briefly explores the notions associated with toponymic investigations. Among others, it introduces approaches such as the micro-/macro-, intensive/extensive, semasiological/onomasiological analytical strategies, and the concepts of endonym/exonym. Attempts by scholars to produce taxonomies of place names according to toponymic classification systems are briefly discussed. The chapter ends with a call to view toponyms as ‘linguistic fossils’, as they are generally stable lexical items preserved over centuries, containing valuable sociocultural and linguistic information that enables us to study the past.