Onomastics

The story of the word

Greek grammarians used ὀνομαστικὴ πτῶσις for the nominative, the case that does the naming, and the adjective kept that sense of naming ever since. Onomastics reads names as evidence: place names map old settlement and old languages, surnames map trades and migrations, and a distribution of first names dates a document better than its handwriting sometimes can. Greek ὄνομα and Latin nomen descend from the same ancestor, which is why name and noun rhyme in meaning.

How it travelled

Ancient Greek → scholarly coinage → English

First recorded

20th century