Woensel

Woensel is a former town in the Dutch province of North Brabant, but nowadays a borough of Eindhoven.

An important rural village in North Brabant, Woensel is mentioned in a document from 1107; it was the seat of a deanage of the diocese of Liège. According to the German mythologist Jacob Grimm is the name Woensel a reference to the Germanic god Wodan (Odin in Norse mythology). The suffix would have been an abbreviation of either -sala ("hall") or -loo ("forest").

Around 1200, Eindhoven, a fortification on the Dommel river to the south of Woensel, grew into a local market town that took more political prominence, but never surpassed Woensel in prosperity or population.

Woensel was a separate municipality until the fusion, in 1920, of Eindhoven proper (i.e. within the town walls) and its surrounding villages into a single municipality. Today, Woensel is Eindhoven's largest district, with about 110,000 inhabitants; it is mostly covered by urban neighbourhoods erected between 1950 and 1990.