onomastica

Onomastics is the scholarly study of proper names—the words used to designate people, places, and organizations. It investigates how names originate, what they signify, how they are formed, and how they propagate across languages and societies. The field considers not only linguistic structure but also historical, cultural, and social factors that influence naming practices.

Its main branches are anthroponymy, the study of personal names; toponymy, the study of place names; and related areas such as hydronymy (names of bodies of water), ethnonyms, and corporate or institutional names. Some authors distinguish broader subfields, while others treat onomastics as an umbrella for constructing name inventories, analyzing name-types, and tracing networks of onomastic change.

Researchers use diverse methods, including archival and census sources, church records, maps, and oral history; etymology and semantic analysis; and cross-linguistic comparison. Digital corpora and database resources enable diachronic and geographic studies of name distributions, morphophonological patterns, and borrowed or adapted forms.

Significance: names encode identity, memory, and social authority. They reveal historical contact, migration, linguistic change, and value systems; naming practices may reflect political regimes, religious traditions, or legal rules. Onomastic research supports historical linguistics, cultural heritage, genealogy, and geographic information science.

Terminology: the term onomastics comes from Greek onoma 'name'. The field has roots in classical philology and modern universities; related terms such as onomasiology and onomatology appear in different traditions, with varying emphases on naming processes versus the study of names themselves.