Denby, in the Morleyston and Litchurch Hundred of Derbyshire, takes its name from the Old English ethnonym Dene ‘a Dane’ and Old Norse by ‘a farmstead, a village’.
Traditionally, the place-name has been interpreted as referring to a settlement of Danes. However, the exact implications of such a name are not yet fully understood and are the subject of ongoing work by Dr Jayne Carroll of the Institute for Name-Studies, University of Nottingham.