Onomastics

Template:Short description 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.<ref>Template:Cite arXiv</ref><ref>Template:Cite arXiv</ref> It is a popular approach in historical research, where it can be used to identify ethnic minorities within populations<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> and for the purpose of prosopography.

Etymology

Onomastics originates from the Greek Template:Lang (Template:Langx),<ref>ὀνομαστικός Template:Webarchive, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus project</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> itself derived from Template:Lang (Template:Langx).<ref>ὄνομα Template:Webarchive, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus project</ref>

Branches

• Toponymy (or more precisely toponomastics), one of the principal branches of onomastics, is the study of place names.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
• Anthroponymy is the study of personal names.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
• Literary onomastics is the branch that researches the names in works of literature and other fiction.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
• Socio-onomastics or re-onomastics is the study of names within a society or culture.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

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

External links

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