The Greek that is transliterated as “Antioch” in English means “driven against.” (Source: Cornwall / Smith 1997)

In Western Lawa it is given the prefix weīyng (เวียง) to denote it as a larger settlement.

David Clark (in The Bible Translator 2013, p. 54ff. ) explains: “Place names often present difficulties in minority languages in Thailand, where it is normal to prefix unfamiliar names with a ‘classifier’ to show whether the name refers to a town, village, river, mountain, island, and so on. The problem in many such languages is that whereas English has numerous terms for human settlements of different size and importance (metropolis, conurbation, city, town, village, hamlet, etc.), they have only two terms. Generally, one refers to a metropolis like Bangkok, and the other to virtually all other settlements. This kind of contrast does not transfer well into the historical and cultural setting of the Bible, where even quite large towns were relatively small by modern standards. Especially in the Old Testament, what the Hebrew text calls ‘cities’ (because they had a wall) would often be classed as no more than villages in Thai minority languages. What many translators have done is to apply the term for a larger settlement to places of importance in the narrative, even if they were not very large in absolute terms. Thus in Lawa, Antioch, which is of considerable significance in Acts, is given the label for the larger size of settlement (weīyng).”

Learn more on Bible Odyssey: Antioch .