Onomastics

Onomastics or onomatology is the study of the etymology, history, and use of proper names.[1] An orthonym is the proper name of the object in question, the object of onomastic study.

Onomastics can be helpful in data mining, with applications such as named-entity recognition, or recognition of the origin of names.[2][3] It has also been used in historical research to identify ethnic minorities within wider populations.[4][5]

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 toponomastics), one of the principal branches of onomastics, is the study of place names.
• Anthroponomastics is the study of personal names.
• Literary onomastics is the branch that researches the names in works of literature and other fiction.[9]

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
• UNGEGN Toponymic Guidelines
• United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names

References

1. "onomastics". 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.
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.
6. ὀνομαστικός, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus project
7. "Online Etymology Dictionary". etymonline.com. Retrieved 26 July 2015.
8. ὄνομα, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus project
9. Alvarez-Altman, Grace; Burelbach, Frederick M. (1987). Names in Literature: Essays from Literary Onomastics Studies.

External links

• Onomastics at Curlie
• Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, a Major Research Project of the British Academy, Oxford, contains over 35,000 published Greek names.
• Onomast.com, contains over 50,000 given names with the meanings and origins