The implementation of the Civil Code of the People’s Republic of China in 2021 greatly facilitated the legal procedure for changing one’s name. The current study collected 334 cases of young Chinese women’s given name changes from January to June 2022 on the Xiaohongshu app, a lifestyle platform that inspires people to discover and connect with a range of diverse lifestyles. After collecting the 334 former and 334 present names of the Chinese women included in this research, the reasons the respondents gave for changing their given names were examined. These reasons included following superstition, correcting registration mistakes, and clarifying gender confusion. The decisions to adopt new names were found to have been motivated by several different reasons. These motivations are explained in detail. As will be shown, the self-renaming practices discovered in this study demonstrate how modern Chinese women can use their personal names to reflect their personal identity. The findings of this study increase our collective understanding of women’s efforts to express their self-awareness through name change.

Names and Naming in Beowulf: Studies in Heroic Narrative Tradition. By Philip A. Shaw. London: Bloomsbury Academic. 2020. Pp. 228 (Paperback). £28.99. ISBN 13: 9781350211674.

Data from the UK Local BMD, a volunteer project to transcribe the birth, marriage and death records of England and Wales, is a rare onomastic resource, being one of the few public datasets to contain full names. However, it has yet to be presented in a form amenable to large-scale analysis. This article processes 25,213,860 birth and 9,887,244 death records—collectively representing 204,427 names across 289 years–into a resource for community use. The data are presented alongside a number of summary statistics and both internal and external validation of its integrity. The data, along with the code used to generate it, are available at http://www.github.com/sjbush/uk_bmd for non-commercial research purposes.

This article examines the issue of gender (im)balance in street and roundabout names in Poland’s three largest cities: Warsaw, Kraków, and Łódź. The focus of this research falls within the area of urbanonymy, a field that has recently gained in international popularity. However, so far, Poland has received scant attention in urbanonymy, especially in the context of gender imbalance and feminist geography. As the current statistical analysis shows, Polish urbanonyms derived from male names considerably outnumber those derived from female names in Warsaw, Kraków, and Łódź. This paper provides a detailed data onomastic analysis of each of these cities, broken down by borough.1 This data presentation is preceded by a description of the public debate on urbanonyms and the role of women’s names in public spaces in Poland. This debate is becoming increasingly frequent in Polish media and public discourse; this topicality has resulted in campaigns to have the gender imbalance in Polish eponymous urbanonyms redressed. In Kraków, one in three streets is named after a man, and urbanonyms named after males outnumber those named after females by 12.2:1. In Warsaw and Łódź, 1 in 5 eponymous urbanonyms is named after a man, and those named after a male outnumber those named after a female by 9.4:1 and 7.4:1 respectively. As this research shows, many of the reasons for this disproportion are to be found in the histories and contemporary socio-political profiles of Poland’s individual regions.

The Nameplate: Jewelry, Culture and Identity. By Marcel Rosa-Salas and Isabel Attyah Flower. New York: Clarkson Potter. 2023. Pp. 256 (Hardback). $30.00. ISBN 13: 9780593235294.

The current paper investigates the intra-pair similarity of twins’ first names in comparison to non-twin siblings. The dataset was composed of 2,387 pairs of Brazilian names of same-sex individuals as a function of sex, age (< 18 years vs > 18 years), and self-reported zygosity (MZ: Monozygotic vs DZ: Dizygotic). We assigned scores to each pair of names according to a classification system of 12 categories of intra-pair similarity (0 = absent; and 1 = present). The final score was the sum of the points obtained. ANOVA revealed that MZ twins (95% CI 2.28-2.50) had more similar names than DZ twins (95% CI 2.03-2.26), who, in turn, had more similar names than non-twins (95% CI 1.45-1.87). Females (95% CI 2.38-2.57) generally had more similar names than males (95% CI 1.63-1.83), and siblings over 18 years of age (95% CI 2.34-2.56) were given more similar names than siblings under 18 years of age (95% CI 1.85-2.03). Our results support and extend previous findings providing insight into parental expectations about individuality-relationality that may influence the negotiation of relationship and construction of identity. By naming their twin children, parents emphasize twinness through similar names, whereas they emphasize the individuality of their single-born children through different names.

Research has shown that some first names can be disadvantageous on the marriage market. However, the precise mechanisms whereby names influence mate selection behaviour remain unknown. This study attempted to address this gap. More specifically, this investigation examined Japanese women’s preferences for male partners with common male names with clear readings as compared to male partners with names with unclear or “ambiguous” readings. This investigation had two guiding hypotheses: (1) Japanese women have a lower preference for ambiguous male names; (2) the lower degree of preference for ambiguous male names was attributable to Japanese women assuming that the names were indicative of a low social class. To test these hypotheses, we conducted a conjoint experiment of 1,261 single Japanese women aged 25 to 34 years in a fictitious online mate selection setting. Participants were provided with fourteen randomly generated profiles of potential marital partners and were asked to decide whether to prefer them or not. It was found that the female participants preferred profiles with common male names over profiles with ambiguous male names in an online mate selection setting, with a significant effect size of 7 percentage points. This finding supported hypothesis 1. However, no evidence was found for hypothesis 2.

For more than a decade, the American Name Society has singled out an outstanding article to be given the Best Article of the Year Award. To select the publication to receive this prestigious honor, each member of the Editorial Board independently reviewed all of the articles that had been published in 2023. As per ANS tradition, obituaries, notes, editorials, book reviews, and articles contributed by the Editor-in-Chief were excluded from consideration. To make their decision, Board Members were asked to select the publications which they felt possessed the highest degree of creativity; demonstrated the best writing style; employed the soundest research methodology; and had the greatest potential to make a lasting and significant contribution to onomastics. This report details the results of that selection process and reveals the 2023 winner of the ANS Best Article of the Year award.

In diaspora and post-colonial communities, ethnic Chinese people tend to adopt names that are common in majority English-speaking countries. Compared to these communities, less attention has been paid to mainland Chinese, where the practice of adopting an English name is in the process of becoming normalised among the current generation of fifteen to thirty-five-year-olds. This paper is part of a wider project to examine the English naming practices of Chinese students from mainland China. It focuses specifically on name choices and the reasons for these choices. A 44-item questionnaire was completed by 357 mainland Chinese students, and this paper reports the quantitative data relevant to name choices and the reasons behind them. The results display an array of preferred English names and suggest that one of the key aspects of name choice is the uniqueness of the name, which served multiple purposes: distinguishing themselves from the peers, enabling them to be remembered, and expressing their identity. Additionally, Chinese students demonstrated a high degree of agency in their name choices, which was evident in the creative approaches used in name selection.

The Kazakh anthroponymicon during its centuries-old history did not experience serious pressure from religious and state institutions and therefore is characterized by a high degree of non-formalization. It has preserved the ancient traditions of naming, which are based on cultural and gender stereotypes: firstly, the preference for the birth of a male baby; and secondly, the birth of a boy child that is considered as a gift of higher sacred powers. This article explores a group of male anthroponyms formed as a result of the addition of substantive forms and the verbs tuu ‘to be born’, kelu ‘to come’, and beru ‘to give’. They retain syntactic relations that go back to the original sentence: propositional semantics and actant models. Complex two-part anthroponyms belong to polypropositive structures; the primary proposition for all of them is the proposition ‘A child was born’. Further, depending on the semantics and valency of the verbal component, there are situations of a reward, a birth time with different actants. In the surface structure of the anthroponym, depending on the relevance for those who give the name, in addition to the predicate, actants of various types are verbalized, such as agent, patient, and donor. In addition to the dictum content, the considered names include modal meanings: an evaluative mode, intention, which are expressed implicitly. Names-wishes and names-thanksgiving are distinguished depending on the intention.