hypocorism
According to Wikipedia: A hypocorism […] is a diminutive form of a name. Hypocorisms include pet names or calling names[…] The article also includes lists of dozens of hypocorisms from many languages.
Archive for Names
Puritan names
Entertaining-by-modern-standards Puritan names: part one (2012), part two (2013). The posts don’t explicitly say whether these are real historical Puritan names or modern made-up ones, but I think the former. They appear to be extracted from Curiosities of Puritan Nomenclature, by Charles Wareing Endell Bardsley (1888), which you can now view online in its entirety […]
How places in our solar system get their names
On the International Astronomical Union processes for naming asteroids, comets, and planetary features: “How Do New Planets Get Their Names?” (Published in 2017.)
Neural net comes up with bird-species names
Janelle Shane, who has trained neural nets to generate entertainingly semi-plausible names for all sorts of things (Pokémon, Star Wars characters, etc), posted a new list about a month ago: bird names. But this time, most of the names weren’t much weirder than real names of bird species. Still, I enjoyed them. A few I […]
Putting the G in Mussorgsky
Earlier today, I had occasion to look at the Wikipedia article about Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky. I was amused by the section about variant spellings of his last name, especially...
Analyzing Benedict Cumberbatch name variants
Back in December, linguistics grad student Gretchen McCulloch analyzed joke variants on Benedict Cumberbatch's name to see what the underlying patterns are. She gave more statistical detail in a post...
Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony
Someone mentioned the Emmy Awards the other day, and I realized I wasn't sure why they were called that. I figured they must have been named after some famous person...
Secret Service code names
TIME magazine provides a list of 11 Great Secret Service Code Names. I don't love their discussions and presentation of the names, but I like the names themselves, from Paul...
Spammer names
Still clearing out old comment spam, but close to done. Most of the time, spambots either enter non-name phrases into the Name box or use pretty ordinary names. But I...
theophory
Sometime around the beginning of March, I came across the word theophory, which Wikipedia says is "the practice of embedding the name of a god or a deity in, usually,...