Since the 19th century and the Industrial Revolution, insomnia has become a major public health issue. Attracted by the financial potential, the pharmaceutical industry quickly turned its attention to this emerging market. However, in a competitive market, pharmaceutical manufacturers had to create distinct product identities. One determining factor when creating an identity is trade name choice. This study investigates changes in trade names for insomnia medicines, from Veronal in 1903 to Quviviq, the latest drug launched in 2022. The lexicological analysis reveals that names have shifted from associative to abstract names. While older trade names had symbolic meaning, newer names were found to place the emphasis on phonetically pleasing onomastic patterns.

Proper names and naming are an integral component of dramatic texts. However, to date, scant and fragmented scholarly attention has been given to the connection between proper names and key dramatic elements—namely, stage directions, characterization, and plot progression. This paper adopts corpus linguistics as a method to show how a corpus linguistic approach to onomastics in drama can, on the one hand, provide analysts with a scoping overview of names and naming in plays, and, on the other hand, offer a richer insight into core dramatic elements. Using as a case study Edward Childs Carpenter’s play The Cinderella-Man (1915), it argues that corpus analysis and visualization techniques such as keyword analysis, frequency analysis, concordance analysis, collocation analysis, and dispersion plot analysis can enrich the study of names and naming in drama. The paper contributes to and extends recent research that has called for the incorporation of corpus linguistic approaches in onomastics research.

In this note, we describe how to install and use the ‘toponym’ R package, which is designed for mapping and manipulating toponymic data from the GeoNames database. This introduction will allow even unexperienced users of R to efficiently produce maps and perform simple analyses.

This study conducts a multi-level linguistic analysis of a corpus of 316 boyband names. Grammatical and semantic analyses are harnessed to shed light on the discourses surfacing across such names. The discursive patterns identified are in general related to the negotiation of masculinity as it unfolds within partly clashing norms in relation to three major aspects: the male artists’ construction of masculinity, the tastes of the mainly female target audience, and the genre conventions of boyband pop music.

Over the past five decades, onomastics has seen remarkable growth with fruitful publications and interdisciplinary collaborations. Despite the abundance of literature, a panoramic view of contribution networks and the evolutionary trajectory of this field has been lacking. To address this issue, this study presents a statistical assessment complemented by visualization clustering, rendering data from 768 journal articles and 28,357 references, to unfold impactful journals, influential scholars, foundational knowledge, and evolving frontiers. The outcomes of this research showcase the distribution of subtopics within each name category, depicting noteworthy contributors, focal trends, and cutting-edge subjects in the area. New themes that illuminate orientations include online naming, multi-identity construction, language processing, corpus-assisted approaches, and neural-cognitive experiments. Further data-driven exploration of name-related themes is foreseen to yield valuable insights. Through this comprehensive assessment, this study elucidates the role of names as manifestations of human identity, social emotions, aesthetic ingenuity, and strategic communicative paradigms. The findings are poised to facilitate the discernment of human quality, societal stratification, interpretative nuances, and relationships underlying social issues. Additionally, this research exemplifies the efficacy of bibliometric analysis and proposes strategies to mitigate potential constraints, disclosing how quantitative data from onomastics can be applied in the digital era and beyond.

A brocade is a type of heavy cloth with a raised pattern embroidered in gold or silver silk thread. Chinese brocades are famous for their long history, exquisite patterns, and weaving techniques. This study examines 160 Chinese brocade product names, 31 category names, and 24 subcategory names. The names were extracted from A Complete Guide to Chinese Brocade for the purpose of investigating the onomastic patterns of brocades through lexicological and semantic feature analysis. Our results show that the names of brocade categories were usually formed by at most two lexicological units, while the names of brocade products were commonly composed of three or more lexicological units. The lexicological structure of these brocade names was as follows: [pattern name + jin ‘brocade’]. Most of the brocade names investigated in this study had the following composition: [modifier(s) + the core semantic element jin ‘brocade’], with the modifiers indicating different characteristics of the brocade. In addition to offering a presentation of these findings, this study also explores the socio-cultural implication of these brocade names from a socio-onomastic perspective. Our results show that the Chinese brocade names examined reflect the Chinese people’s pursuit of a happy, wealthy, and healthy life, along with a harmonious relationship with nature and other people.

The goal of this article is to offer an overview of Italian urbanonyms by analyzing the grammatical and lexical properties of urbanonyms from four cities (Rome, Naples, Milan, and Venice). A classification is offered via data extracted from each city’s PagineGialle ‘Yellow Pages’ street directories, from which three key results emerge. First, Italian urbanonyms mostly involve two distinct constructions: nominal compounds (e.g., Piazza Grande ‘Great Square’) and genitive phrases (e.g., Arco dei Volsci ‘Volsci’s Arc’). Each construction can involve two or more “layered” generic terms (e.g., via, san in Via San Francesco). Secondly, generic terms attested in Italian urbanonyms can feature both “culture-general” items (e.g., via ‘street’) and cultureand city-specific items (e.g., lungotevere ‘Tiber riverside’, naviglio ‘navigable canal’). Thirdly, urbanonyms can carry commemorative but possibly also descriptive (“appellative”) semantic functions. The article concludes by discussing how these results inform current research on urbanonyms.

Personal Names and Naming from an Anthropological-Linguistic Perspective. Edited by Sambulo Ndolovu. Berlin: De Gruyter. 2023. Pp. 375. (E-book) $130.99. ISBN 13: 978-3-11-075929-7.

Names of New York: Discovering the City’s Past, Present, and Future Through Its Place-Names. By Joshua Jelly-Shapiro. New York: Penguin Random House. 2021. Pp. 243. (Hardback) $22.00. ISBN 13: 978-1-5247-4892.