Onomastics

Onomastics (or onomatology in older texts) is the study of proper names, including their etymology, history, and use.

An alethonym ('true name') or an orthonym ('real name') is the proper name of the object in question, the object of onomastic study. Scholars studying onomastics are called onomasticians.

Onomastics has applications in data mining, with applications such as named-entity recognition, or recognition of the origin of names.^[1][2] It is a popular approach in historical research, where it can be used to identify ethnic minorities within populations^[3][4] and for the purpose of prosopography.

Etymology

Onomastics originates from the Greek onomastikós (ὀνομαστικός, 'of or belonging to naming'),^[5][6] itself derived from ónoma (ὄνομα, 'name').^[7]

Branches

• Toponymy (or more precisely toponomastics), one of the principal branches of onomastics, is the study of place names.^[8]
• Anthroponomastics is the study of personal names.^[9]
• Literary onomastics is the branch that researches the names in works of literature and other fiction.^[10]
• Socio-onomastics or re-onomastics is the study of names within a society or culture.^[11]

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. Carsenat, Elian (2013). "Onomastics and Big Data Mining". arXiv:1310.6311 [cs.CY].
2. Mitzlaff, Folke; Stumme, Gerd (2013). "Onomastics 2.0 - The Power of Social Co-Occurrences". arXiv:1303.0484 [cs.IR].
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. ὀνομαστικός Archived 2020-08-05 at the Wayback Machine, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus project
6. "Online Etymology Dictionary". etymonline.com. Archived from the original on 27 August 2017. Retrieved 26 July 2015.
7. ὄνομα Archived 2021-02-25 at the Wayback Machine, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus project
8. Cacciafoco, Francesco Perono; Cavallaro, Francesco (2023). Place Names: Approaches and Perspectives in Toponymy and Toponomastics.
9. Bruck, Gabriele (2009). The Anthropology of Names and Naming.
10. Alvarez-Altman, Grace; Burelbach, Frederick M. (1987). Names in Literature: Essays from Literary Onomastics Studies.
11. 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