A Deep Dive into Naming Conventions: -onym Examples

Or, A rose by any other nym would smell as sweet.

How many –nyms was I able to think of off the top of my head?

What about you?

Well, for me, they were the obvious ones, and some linguistic ones, which I left for later:

acronym – those Marmite abbreviations that can really get on your nerves, especially when they’re obscure and used by specialists who assume everyone else should know and understand them.

They even have their own acronym, TLA – short for ‘three-letter acronyms’ – which is autological: it possesses in itself the quality it describes or denotes.

I thought acronyms were dying out, but they’ve shown how useful they can be in texting, or on soshul meedyah:  

FOMO, MILF, DILF and even GILF (‘fear of missing out’, ‘mother I’d like to f***’, ‘dad…’ and even ‘grandmother…’).

ICYMI (‘in case you missed it’) is spelled out as I-C-Y-M-I, which makes it technically an initialism, just like dear old Auntie, the BBC. The same applies to AFAIU (‘As far as I understand’) and several other thumb-saving acronyms.

The acro-, incidentally, is the same prefix as in the Acropolis, meaning ‘highest, uppermost’.

pseudonym – It would be hard not to know this one if you’ve ever read anything by the Brontë sisters, Currer (Charlotte), Ellis (Emily) and Acton (Anne) Bell. Resorting to male names enhanced their chances of being takes seriously, just as George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) improved hers. ‘Mrs Gaskell’ published her first success, Mary Barton, anonymously, having earlier used the pseudonym ‘Cotton Mather Mills.’ That book’s success enabled her to continue publishing under her matronly name. And J.K. Rowling uses her pseudonym of Robert Galbraith for the opposite reason to the Brontës, of being so famous under another name, which is in any case a pen name: she has no middle name.

Another word for pseudonym is nom de plume, literally ‘name of pen’, pens at the time (1840/41) still being ‘plumes’, quills. Though it sounds like a French loan, it isn’t. In fact, French has even borrowed it back since at least 1970, but generally prefers pseudonyme.

And there are the jokey blends, nom de nym and pseudoplume.

The English for nom de plume, pen-name dates to sometime before 1864 and is first cited in an edition of that date of Noah Webster’s famous dictionary.  

synonym, antonym

Everyone who has ever used a thesaurus will surely know the first, though not necessarily the second – unless they’re devotees of Roget’s Thesaurus, which lists not only synonyms but their opposites.

eponym

We possibly know its derivative, eponymous, better than it, as in ‘We recall Goethe writing The Sorrows of Young Werther, which set off a wave of suicides in Europe in imitation of the eponymous hero.’ The meaning here is ‘(of a person) giving their name to something’.

As for eponym, it has two meanings, opposite sides of the same coin: ‘a person after whom a discovery, invention, place, etc., is named or thought to be named.’ That includes, for instance,  László József Bíró, the Hungarian-born inventor of the ballpoint pen, or Mrs Malaprop, who gave her name to the malapropism.*

The second meaning is a noun named after a person, which often happens with medical terms, such as Parkinson’s disease. We’re so used to the term that we forget it’s named after James Parkinson (1755–1824), an apothecary, surgeon and geologist who first described the symptoms clinically.

Similarly, we mispronounce and misspell his name so often that we don’t realise fuchsias are named in honour of Leonhard Fuchs (1501–66), a German botanist. In fact, just now I found myself typing fuschia, which is how the flower is generally pronounced.

And last in this list of the more obvious ones comes toponym, for a place name, especially one derived from a geographical or topographical feature. But mostly we know it as a name given to a person or thing marking their origin: The Manchester Guardian, now simply The Guardian; lima beans, from the capital of Peru; vichyssoise from Vichy, France; Tabasco sauce from Tabasco, Mexico.

How many –nyms are there?

It depends where you look. I can’t search the Collins or M-W sites using a wild card, but I can the Oxford Online Dictionary, which give me a total of 28, plus the suffix –onym itself.

The OED contains 51, plus the suffix –onym. In each case the –onym is more accurate than my playful –nym, since it better reflects the suffix ‑ωνυμον, deriving ultimately from the Greek word ὄνομα (onoma) ‘name’, which is also the first part of onomatopoeia. It is also more accurate than my featured image, created by a miracle of science and AI.

Though a handful are from Greek via Latin, many others are loanwords from French or German or formed according to the rules of English word formation.

What links them all?

They all have to do with naming, obviously. This could be naming a category or type of word, antonym, synonym, acronym; words talking about names, such as toponym, pseudonym, exonym; or words naming a semantic relationship, as I explain next.

A curated selection:

anacronym – an acronym of a noun phrase that people are not usually familiar with or that is too cumbersome to say very often. An everyday example is that irritating captcha you have to undergo these days practically to tie your own shoelaces, short for ‘completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart’.

Other example are radar (radio detection and ranging) and taser (Tom Swift’s electric rifle (a fictitious weapon)), on the pattern of laser (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation). As you can see, they’re treated as common nouns and not capitalised.

backronym, bacronym – A(n often cumbersome) acronym created, as the OED states ‘from a phrase whose initial letters spell out a particular word or words, chosen to enhance memorability’ and an example is SAD for ‘seasonal affective disorder’. It can also be a post hoc but inaccurate attempt to explain a word by reference to the letters that make it up:

‘Ned is falsely assumed to denote a ‘Non-Educated Delinquent’, a pejorative backronym that permits symbolic power to denigrate with impunity.’

For those unfamiliar with the word ned, it’s a mostly Scottish word describing someone the speaker views as socially undesirable and inferior, a hooligan, a lout.

contronym – A word with two opposite meanings, and one of my favourites, because it reflects the versatility and variety of language. Two classic examples are to cleave, meaning a) to cling to and b) to split asunder, and to sanction, meaning a) to officially approve and permit and b) to punish and penalise. Cleave is really a case of homography, or two separate words with different origins in Old English. Another everyday example of a controynm is to dust, meaning a) to remove dust from a surface and b) to sprinkle something such as icing sugar over a surface.

An exonym is a word for a place used by people from a different country or language group than the one the place belongs to. Think English London, French Londres; German Köln, English Cologne; English Copenhagen, Danish København; Gaelic Alba, English Scotland.

hypernym, hyponym – These are the Tweedledee and Tweedledum of semantic terms. They indicate lexical relations between words, and so are a bit technical. A hypernym is the name for a broad(ish) superordinate category which includes several terms ‘below’ it. Colour is the hypernym of red, green, blue, etc. Those colour terms are in turn hyponyms of the word colour. This relationship is often shown as a tree, as in this Wikipedia link. Hyper– means ‘over’ and hypo- means ‘under’, as in hypothermia.

meronym – A meronym denotes a part–whole relationship. Thus sleeve is a meronym of coat, shirt, dress, jacket, blouse, etc.

retronym – A term the modifies an existing word to describe an earlier version of something from a later, technological version. Remember, before microwaves, ovens were simply ‘ovens’, but now they’re often called ‘conventional ovens’. Coffee was coffee before decaffeinated coffee, so now you might ask for a ‘regular (insert preferred type) coffee’.

tautonym – I really like this one: a scientific name in which the same word is used for genus and species, for example Vulpes vulpes (the red fox). There are dozens, but Pica pica, the European magpie, is particularly delightful, as is Gazella gazella, the mountain gazelle..  

How old are these acronyms?

The oldest, perhaps expectedly, is synonym, and dates to before 1475.

The latest is paedonym, admittedly rare, a word named after one’s child, and dating to 1987.

All but six of the OED’s list are nineteenth- and twentieth-century creations.

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Are there are any concepts still looking for an –onym name? Only time will tell.

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* Should you ever need a recherché term for malapropism, try catachresis.