Structure and Creativity in Naming Practices Panel (21 February 2026, ANS Annual Meeting, Virtual)

Join us for a panel on structure and creativity in naming practices at the 2026 Annual Meeting of the American Name Society. Papers in this panel include:

“On the linguistic structure of paint color names: Kale green, slow green or green sprout?” by Elsi Kaiser, University of Souther California, USA

Relative to basic-level color terms (e.g. green, yellow), color names (e.g. Kale Green, Friendly Yellow) have received less linguistic attention. We present an analysis of 6000+ paint names from six paint companies. We looked at names with color terms in first/second position (e.g. Blue Sky, Sky Blue) and identified four main types. We posit that novel noun+color compounds (e.g. Summer White) and human-trait attribution (e.g. Friendly Yellow, Agreeable Gray) are frequent because they yield eye-catching names while allowing some color identifiability. We also analyze part-of-speech (Acorn, Intuitive, Ponder), metaphorical uses (Patience vs. Snow), and morphology (Greige (gray+beige), Grayish).

“Breed, Language, and Word Formation in the Names of Thoroughbreds in Turkey” by F. Nihan Ketrez, Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey

This study investigates the naming practices of Arabian and English thoroughbreds in Turkey. Names were analyzed by language (Turkish, foreign, or mixed), length, and morpho(syntactic) structure: simplex, derived, compound, phrase, or sentence. Results show that Arabian horses are more likely to bear Turkish names, which are also shorter on average, while English thoroughbreds more often carry foreign names. Across both languages, compounding is the most frequent word-formation strategy, and overall proportions of naming strategies are similar. These findings highlight how horse breed correlates with language choice and name length, contributing to crosslinguistic research on animal naming practices.

Learn more and register for the meeting here:

The full schedule is available here:

Names in Discourse and the Transmission of Knowledge Panel (21 February 2026, ANS Annual Meeting, Virtual)

 

 

 

 

Join us for a panel on names in discourse and the transmission of knowledge at the 2026 Annual Meeting of the American Name Society.

“Names in Contemporary Written Discourse: Sociopragmatic Functions in the Context of Educational Resources” by Emilia Aldrin, Halmstad University, Sweden

This presentation explores the sociopragmatic functions of names in contemporary, written non-fiction, with a focus on the authoritative discourse of school textbooks (Fairclough 2010, Gray 2016). Since naming choices may shape young readers’ perceptions (Macintyre & Hamilton 2010, Keller & Franzak 2016), the study asks: How are names used in textbook discourse, and what functions do they serve? Combining insights from pragmatics, socioonomastics and literary onomastics, an analytical framework is outlined. Identified functions include providing referential knowledge, signalling status, engaging readers, underlining authority, and shaping identities. Examples from Swedish primary school textbooks illustrate the discussion, with relevance beyond educational texts.

“Place Names in the Latin American Literary Discourse” by Irina Martynenko, RUDN University and Kutafin Moscow State Law University, Russia

The presentation examines the functioning of place names in fiction and their connection with real geographical objects. Based on the texts of some outstanding Latin American writers, the author analyzes the origin of toponyms recorded in their works, the historical context and the features of their use in personal artistic discourse. Particular attention is paid to cases when writers use place names in a metaphorical meaning, as well as the role of toponyms in the narrative of national identity. The results of the analysis showed that geonames in fiction perform not only a nominative, locative, but also a symbolic function.

Learn more and register for the meeting here:

The full schedule is available here:

Names, Naming, and Diversity in Youth Literature Panel (21 February 2026, ANS Annual Meeting, Virtual)

Join us for a special panel on diversity in youth literature at the 2026 Annual Meeting of the American Name Society.

Recent years have seen a blistering and sustained effort to severely limit the breadth and range of literature available to readers. This censorship movement has been especially active in trying to control publications for underage readers. In response to this controversy, Bloomsbury will soon release a new book in the onomastic series edited NAMES Editor-in-Chief, I. M. Nick. This multi-authored volume specifically explores names, naming, and diversity in youth literature. The panel presents some of the many works featured in the upcoming compendium.

The book is available for Pre-order from Bloomsbury here.

Learn more and register for the meeting here:

The full schedule is available here:

American Name Society Annual Meeting 2026 Registration and Schedule (Via Zoom, February 21, 2026)

 

The 2026 ANS Annual Conference will be held online, via Zoom, on 21 February 2026. Registration is now open here. There is a new conference fee structure that is discounted based on annual income. Read more about the conference fee structure here.

Event Details

The American Name Society Annual Meeting for 2026 will be held online on February 21, 2026 using the Zoom platform.

It is accessible via Mac or PC. The meeting will require a passcode, which will be sent via email to all registrants and presenters by February 20th.

We have been working hard to set up a schedule that will work globally, and this means that some presenters will be scheduled at times outside of normal working hours.

The agenda for the meeting includes presentations by onomastic scholars from around the world, along with our annual Business Meeting and a report on the state of our journal, NAMES. All are welcome to the conference — you do not need to be a member to attend!

The Book of Abstracts will be available here before the conference.

 

Click here to see the preliminary schedule of presentations and meetings

 

We hope to see you there!

 

Event URL:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/american-name-society-annual-meeting-2026-tickets-1980904507707

Call for Papers: Names That Reveal; Names That Conceal: Onomastic Sleight of Hand in Global Literature (MLA 2027)

The American Name Society

Call for Papers

for the ANS virtual panel at the

Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention #mla27

7-10 January 2027, Los Angeles, California

Names That Reveal; Names That Conceal

Onomastic Sleight of Hand in Global Literature

Espionage novels and allegories often use names to conceal motives or plot twists or to reveal character or caricature. How have authors, poets, playwrights, screenwriters, lyricists and other wordsmiths used names of characters, places, corporations, institutions, movements, etc., to effect onomastic sleight of hand? And why? In this panel, we will consider names that reveal and names that conceal people groups (anthroponyms), characters (charactonyms), places (toponyms), theonyms (divine beings), events, and more in the real world and/or in imagined worlds from any era, from any place, as recorded or found in any media. Useful resources include, the archives of NAMES: A Journal of Onomastics (https://ans-names.pitt.edu/ans/issue/archive), the ANS list of terminology (https://ans-names.pitt.edu/ans/keywords), Dorothy Dodge Robbins’ edited collection Literary Onomastics (2023), Star Medzerian Vanguri’s edited collection Rhetorics of Names and Naming (2016), and the Oxford Handbook of Names and Naming(2018).

Proposal Submission Process:

  1. Email Dr. Anne W. Anderson (editing@gmail.com) as follows:
    1. Email Subject Line: Use “MLA 2027 proposal” in the subject line of the email.
    2. Email Body: In the email body include the title and first line of the abstract, the full name(s) of the author(s), their affiliation(s), and their email address(es).
    3. Proposal: Attach a PDF file that includes the proposal title, an abstract of up to 350-500 words, and a list of works cited. Do NOT include author identification in the PDF.
  2. DEADLINE: Proposals must be received by 11:59 pm EST on Monday, 16 March 2026. Authors will be notified about the results of the blind review on or by 27 March 2026.
  3. Contributors selected for the thematic panel must be members of both MLA and ANS in order to present their papers; both memberships must be obtained by 7 April 2026.
  4. Questions? Please contact Dr. Anne W. Anderson (editing@gmail.com).

“Slop” is the American Dialect Society’s 2025 Word of the Year

The American Dialect Society, in its 36th annual words-of-the-year vote, selected slop as the Word of the Year for 2025. More than three hundred attendees took part in the deliberations and voting, in an event hosted in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America’s annual meeting.

The word slop was recognized for its widespread use for low-quality, high-quantity content, most typically produced by generative AI. While AI slop was a nominee in the American Dialect Society’s 2024 Word of the Year vote, in 2025 slop could stand on its own, with the AI context often implicitly understood. Slop was also recognized as a productive combining form to describe anything of little value generated in mass quantities.

Presiding at the Jan. 9 voting session were Ben Zimmer, chair of the ADS New Words Committee, and Dr. Kelly Elizabeth Wright of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Slop isn’t a new word. It has moved from the pig sty, to the algorithm, and now forms new compounds such as sloppunk, slopification, and friend slop,” Dr. Wright said. “This productivity has no end in sight.”

Word of the Year is interpreted in its broader sense as “vocabulary item”—not just words but also phrases, compounds, and affixes. The items do not have to be brand-new, but they have to be newly prominent or notable in the past year.

The vote is the longest-running such vote anywhere, the only one not tied to commercial interests, and the word-of-the-year event up to which all others lead. It is fully informed by the members’ expertise in the study of words, but it is far from a solemn occasion.

Members in the 136-year-old organization include linguists, lexicographers, etymologists, grammarians, historians, researchers, writers, editors, students, and independent scholars. In conducting the vote, they act in fun and do not pretend to be officially inducting words into the English language. Instead, they are highlighting that language change is normal, ongoing, and entertaining.

Click here to read the press release, which has all the categories and voting results.

“No Kings” is the ANS Name of the Year for 2025

filed under Featured, Name News, Name of the Year

“No Kings” was chosen as the winner of the Name of the Year for 2025 by the American Name Society at its annual Name of the Year discussion and vote on January 8, 2026. This political demonstration name was selected for its direct communicative power, its linguistic brevity, and its extensions during the protests, in forms such as “no thrones” and “no crowns”.… Read More

Nominations Wanted for Names of the Year 2025

The American Name Society is requesting nominations for the “Names of the Year for 2025”. The names selected will be ones that best illustrate, through their creation and/or use during the past 12 months, important trends in the culture of the United States. It is not necessary, however, for a nominated name to have originated in the US. Any name can be nominated as long as it has been prominent in North American cultural discourse during the past year.  Nominations are called for in the following categories:

  • Personal Names: Names or nicknames of individual real people or individual animals.
  • Place Names: Names or nicknames of any real geographical location, including all natural features, political subdivisions, streets, and buildings. Names of national or ethnic groups based on place names could be included here.
  • Trade Names: Names of real commercial products, as well as names of both for-profit and non-profit incorporated companies and organizations, including businesses and universities.
  • Artistic & Literary Names: Names of fictional persons, places, or institutions, in any written, oral, or visual medium, as well as titles of art works, books, plays, television programs, or movies. Such names are deliberately given by the creator of the work.
  • E-Names: Names of persons, figures, places, products, businesses, institutions, operations, organizations, platforms, and movements that exist in the virtual world.
  • Miscellaneous Names: Any name which does not fit in the above five categories, such as names created by linguistic errors, names of particular inanimate objects, names of unorganized political movements, names of languages, etc. In most cases, such items would be capitalized in everyday English orthography.

Winners will be chosen in each category, and then a final vote will determine the overall Name of the Year. Anyone may nominate a name. The discussion will be conducted by Laurel Sutton, ANS Past President and Name of the Year Coordinator.

You can nominate names via this form: https://nick662.typeform.com/to/qiS2bXas?typeform-source=www.americannamesociety.org

Advance nominations must be received no later than January 6, 2026, at midnight Pacific.

The winning names will be selected on Thursday, January 8, 2026  on Zoom from 12-2pm PST . Tickets are free and can be ordered here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ans-name-of-the-year-2025-discussion-and-vote-tickets-1967205383257

The URL to our Zoom room will be sent to everyone who registers for this event.

About Names: Dr. Cleveland Evans on the name “Marlon”

Dr. Cleveland Evans writes about names for the Omaha World-Herald. In his December 28th column, he discusses the name “Marlon”.

Marlon brings in Omaha’s new year with laughs next weekend.

Marlon Wayans, first featured on older brother Keenen Ivory Wayans’ sketch comedy show, “In Living Color” (1992-1993), became a star with brother Shawn on “The Wayans Bros.” (1995-1999). He headlines at Omaha’s Funny Bone Comedy Club Jan. 2, 3 and 4.

Marlon began as a respelling of two different names. Marlin is a French and English surname derived from Merlin, name of King Arthur’s magician. Merlin’s a French version of Welsh Myrddin, itself from Celtic Moridunum, “sea fort.” Like many other family names, Marlin began to be used as a first name in the late 18th century.

Marlin peaked as a first name in the United States in 1935 at 276th. The most famous example was Marlin Perkins (1905-1986), zoologist host of “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom” (1963-1985).

In New England, New York and New Jersey, Marlon was also a respelling of Mahlon. A biblical name of uncertain meaning, Mahlon’s the name of Ruth’s first husband in the Old Testament book of Ruth.

Marlon was a respelling of Mahlon because in the 19th century most New Englanders had “non-rhotic” accents. Even today many Bostonians don’t pronounce “r” at the end of syllables, saying “pahk the cah” for “park the car.”

Two centuries ago, people across the Northeast pronounced “Marlon” and “Mahlon” identically. One example was Marlon Damon (1816-1903) of Goshen, Massachusetts. On his tombstone he’s “Marlon,” but his death certificate says “Mahlon.”

The most famous Marlon, Omaha-born film star Marlon Brando (1924-2004), was named after his father. Marlon Sr.’s father Eugene’s older brother was Marlon H. Brando (1843-1900). They were from Oswego County in upstate New York, so for the Brandos, Marlon may have come from Mahlon.

Eugene was 3 years old and Marlon H. 16 when their father, James, died in 1860, so Marlon was Eugene’s father figure. Marlon Brando Sr. named his first daughter Jocelyn after grandmother Nancy Jocelyn Brando’s maiden name. Jocelyn Brando (1919-2005) also had an acting career.

When Brando became a star playing Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1951), Marlon surged as a baby name. In 1955, Marlon ranked 344th and Marlin 428th.

The name then plateaued until 1970, when the Jackson Five became a musical sensation. Marlon Jackson’s fame exploded his name. 231 Marlons were born in 1969, and 1,029 in 1972, the year Wayans was born. Ever since, Marlon’s been especially popular with African-American parents.

Marlon dropped off quickly after 1972. Wayans’ career may have helped the name a bit. It plateaued at about 0.022% of births in the 1990s when he first became famous. There was even a slight uptick in 2006 when the film “Little Man,” where through the magic of special effects Wayans played a dwarf jewel thief pretending to be a baby, was a box office hit, despite being slammed by critics.

Marlon Lucky (born 1986) was a star running back for the Nebraska Cornhuskers from 2005 to 2009. Second baseman Anderson (1974) and outfielder Byrd (1977) are Marlons with baseball fame.

Jamaican-born novelist Marlon James (1970) won the Man Booker Prize in 2015 for “A Brief History of Seven Killings.”

Since 2006 Marlon’s steadily fallen as a baby name, leaving the top thousand in 2024. Despite that, Brando, Jackson and Wayans’ fame will keep Marlon well known for decades to come.

Want to learn more? Read on to learn more about the name “Marlon”!