Onomastics

Onomastics (or, in older texts, onomatology) is the study of the etymology, history, and use of proper names.^[1] An alethonym ('true name') or an orthonym ('real name') is the proper name of the object in question, the object of onomastic study. A person who studies onomastics is called onomastician.

Onomastics can be helpful in data mining, with applications such as named-entity recognition, or recognition of the origin of names.^[2][3] It is a popular approach in historical research, where it can be used to identify ethnic minorities within wider populations^[4][5] and for the purpose of prosopography.

Etymology

Onomastics originates from the Greek onomastikós (ὀνομαστικός, 'of or belonging to naming'),^[6][7] itself derived from ónoma (ὄνομα, 'name').^[8]

Branches

• Toponymy (or more precisely toponomastics), one of the principal branches of onomastics, is the study of place names.^[9]
• Anthroponomastics is the study of personal names.^[10]
• Literary onomastics is the branch that researches the names in works of literature and other fiction.^[11]
• Socio-onomastics or re-onomastics is the study of names within a society or culture.^[12]

See also

• Ancient Greek personal names
• Extinction of surnames
• Hydronym
• Mononymous persons
• Naming convention
• -onym, listing the technical kinds of names

Organizations

• American Name Society
• English Place-Name Society
• Guild of One-Name Studies
• International Council of Onomastic Sciences
• Society for Name Studies in Britain and Ireland
• United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names

References

1. "onomastics" Archived 2016-03-04 at the Wayback Machine. Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.
2. Carsenat, Elian (2013). "Onomastics and Big Data Mining". arXiv:1310.6311 [cs.CY].
3. Mitzlaff, Folke; Stumme, Gerd (2013). "Onomastics 2.0 - The Power of Social Co-Occurrences". arXiv:1303.0484 [cs.IR].
4. Crymble, Adam (2017-02-09). "How Criminal were the Irish? Bias in the Detection of London Currency Crime, 1797-1821". The London Journal. 43: 36–52. doi:10.1080/03058034.2016.1270876. hdl:2299/19710.
5. Crymble, Adam (2015-07-26). "A Comparative Approach to Identifying the Irish in Long Eighteenth-Century London" (PDF). Historical Methods. 48 (3): 141–152. doi:10.1080/01615440.2015.1007194. hdl:2299/16184. S2CID 161595975. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2020-03-14. Retrieved 2017-08-27.
6. ὀνομαστικός Archived 2020-08-05 at the Wayback Machine, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus project
7. "Online Etymology Dictionary". etymonline.com. Archived from the original on 27 August 2017. Retrieved 26 July 2015.
8. ὄνομα Archived 2021-02-25 at the Wayback Machine, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus project
9. Cacciafoco, Francesco Perono; Cavallaro, Francesco (2023). Place Names: Approaches and Perspectives in Toponymy and Toponomastics.
10. Bruck, Gabriele (2009). The Anthropology of Names and Naming.
11. Alvarez-Altman, Grace; Burelbach, Frederick M. (1987). Names in Literature: Essays from Literary Onomastics Studies.
12. Ainiala, Terhi; Östman, Jan-Ola (2017). Socio-onomastics:The pragmatics of names.

External links

• Onomastics at Curlie
• Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, a major research project of the British Academy, Oxford, containing over 35,000 published Greek names