As of today, the main business application of onomastics is naming, or branding: �nding the proper name for your company or your product to stand out in the world. Meaningfully, Onoma – the Greek root for name – is also a registered trademark of Nomen, the naming agency founded by Marcel Botton in 1981. Nomen initially licensed one of Roland Moreno's inventions, the Radoteur name generator, and...

The study of names (or, to give it its more high-falutin’ name, onomastics) has not always been accorded high academic prestige and is often thought of as a non-specialist’s hobby horse. The fact that most books on naming in bookshops seem to address only prospective parents who need to name their child also does not give the study a high standing. In the university context, this is not somethi...

This study considers the question of the origin of Israel and the interpretation of archaeological evidence for Palestinian hill country culture during the transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age. While new research has enhanced our understanding of the period, it is important to maintain methodological controls in certain areas. This includes the careful evaluation of archaeo...

The identification of the island named Hinba, referred to in Adomnán’s Life of Columba, has exercised scholarly attention intermittently for hundreds of years. Successfully identifying Hinba would have the potential to enhance our understanding of the geography, politics and culture of western Scotland in the early medieval period. This article analyses Adomnán’s references to Hinba and assesse...

Abstract. Onomastics is “the science or study of the origin and forms of proper names of persons or places.” Especially personal names play an important role in daily life, as all over the world future parents are facing the task of finding a suitable given name for their child. This choice is influenced by different factors, such as the social context, language, cultural background and, in par...

Variation in the spelling of names has various origins, many of which many are difficult to describe by rule. We present a method that uses both rules and a similarity measure of a probabilistic nature, and which can make use of existing onomastic corpora. Rules first convert an unknown name to a semiphonemic form. Then a selection is made of possible candidates in the onomastic corpus. For thi...