Pname

Pname is a generic term used in technical writing and programming to represent a person’s name or a parameter name in examples. It is not a formal term with a single canonical definition; its meaning depends on context. In programming and computer science, pname is commonly used in source code samples and pseudocode to illustrate functions that take a name as input, such as greet(pname) or formatName(pname). It may also stand for the program name or process name in scripts and system commands.

In databases and data modeling, pname is a conventional placeholder for a field that stores a person’s full name. When designing schemas, practitioners often replace pname with explicit fields like first_name and last_name to improve clarity and data integrity.

In linguistics and discourse analysis, pname can be used as a variable representing a person’s name in transcripts or experimental prompts, allowing researchers to discuss naming without exposing real identities.

Variations and related terms include generic placeholders such as foo, bar, and baz, and stylistic variants like PName or pname in code. The term is primarily a pedagogical device rather than a term with formal standards.

See also: placeholder, sample code, pseudocode, identifier.