onoma

Onoma is the Greek noun ὄνομα, meaning "name." In both ancient and modern Greek, onoma refers to a designation by which a person, place, idea, or object is identified. The term has survived in scholarly and linguistic usage as the basis for studies of naming practices in languages and cultures.

In linguistics and related fields, onoma gives rise to the discipline of onomastics, or onomastology, which is concerned with proper names and naming systems. Onomastics investigates how names are formed, adopted, transformed, and transmitted across communities and time. It often divides into subfields such as anthroponymy (personal names) and toponymy (place names). The study covers historical evolution, sociolinguistic factors, cultural identity, and the administrative and legal aspects of naming.

Because its root meaning is simply "name," the term and its derivatives appear widely in English and other languages. The suffix -onym, derived from the Greek onoma, is used to form terms that describe types of names, including synonym (a word with a similar meaning), antonym (a word with the opposite meaning), toponym (a place name), and pseudonym (a false or fictional name). The adjective onomastic is used to describe things related to names or naming practices, and onomastics is the academic study of those phenomena.

Overall, onoma underpins a broad area of inquiry into how humans designate and interpret names, reflecting linguistic, cultural, historical, and social dimensions of naming. See also anthroponymy, toponymy, and onomastics for related topics.