NAME

NAME [From Old English nama, cognate with Latin nomen and Greek ónoma/ónuma]. A general, non-technical term for a WORD or PHRASE that designates a person (woman, Helen), an animal (cat, Felix the Cat), a place (Helensburgh, first a town in Scotland, then by commemorative extension a town in Australia), or a thing (the mineral stone, the subject or activity electrical engineering, the novel and motion picture The Hound of the Baskervilles). The same name may serve to designate more than one distinct though linked referent: for example, Saint Helena denotes both a saint and the island ‘named’ in her honour.

Common and proper names

Traditionally, names fall into two categories: (1) The common name, which designates a member of a class, such as cat, tomcat, stone, rhinestone, verse, blank verse. Generally, common names are written without initial capital letters. (2) The proper name, which designates a specific entity: Helen, Troy, Helen of Troy; Henry, Henry Smith, Henry VI (both a person and a play). Generally, proper names are written with initial capital letters for each of their constituents, especially if they are nouns or adjectives: Prince Hal, Blind Harry. Occasionally, however, the capitals are dropped for effect, as in the name of the American poet e. e. cummings (1894–1962), and the names of some periodicals (such as the Australian literary magazine overland). Many common names take the form of generic phrases that open with an embedded proper name, and therefore contain a capital letter, as in Cheddar cheese, Siamese cat, Trojan horse, Wellington boot. See NOUN.

The study and classification of names

The descriptive and historical study of proper names is onomastics, and the study of common names (particularly as they form lexical systems or terminologies and vary from one group of speakers to another) is onomasiology. Proper names are distinguished, according to referent, as: personal names ( William Smith, Heather Gibson); PLACE-NAMES (Alice Springs, Chicago); names of events (Armageddon, the Boer War); names of institutions (the British Museum, the Library of Congress); names of vehicles (Ford, Pontiac; The Orient Express, the Queen Elizabeth II); and works of art such as books and plays (Pickwick Papers, Othello), paintings (the Mona Lisa, the Laughing Cavalier), and musical compositions (Eine kleine Nachtmusik, Finlandia). Name study is logically a branch of linguistics, with an affinity to such other subjects as anthropology and topography, but in practice it is an independent discipline that combines the interests of philologists, linguists, historians, geographers, encyclopaedists, sociologists, psychologists, genealogists, literary critics, and others. See FORM OF ADDRESS.

Associated meaning

The associations evoked by proper names may be either public (as with Chernobyl, a Ukrainian city associated throughout the world with a nuclear accident in 1986) or private (for example, someone associating the name Rex with pain and fear, because once bitten by a dog with that name). Public associations with some place-names are so strong that the names may come to be used in a sense that was originally no more than an association: for example, Fleet Street, a street in London, was until the late 1980s the location of many British newspaper offices, and came to mean, by metonymy, the British national press. It continues to be so used even though all London newspapers are now located elsewhere. Personal names often have both public and private associations that derive from particular individuals with those names: for example, Mary used to be, in the words of a popular song, ‘a grand old name’, the epitome of feminine virtue. Recently, however, it has been declining in popularity over much of the English-speaking world, and is now widely regarded as old-fashioned and pietistic. It may continue, however, to be used in certain families, for the sake of tradition, and may evoke the memory of a particular Mary whenever mentioned. See ACRONYM, BBC PRONUNCIATION UNIT, CLIPPING, EPITHET, EPONYM, ETHNIC NAME, FORM OF ADDRESS, LETTER WORD, ONOMATOPOEIA, -ONYM, PLACE-NAME, PROPER NOUN, TRADEMARK, WORD.