Proper name

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This original article about proper names focuses on the following questions:

  • What distinguishes proper names from common nouns?
  • Is there such a thing as proper names at all?

This article is English-centric, focusing on English proper names, and makes use of the English use of definite and indefinite articles, "the", "a" and "an". Nonetheless, some of the deliberations may apply to other languages as well.

This article is in part philosophical, in part linguistic. A learner of English will find something of interest here, while probably finding some of the deliberations uninteresting since too philosophical and impractical.

Distinguishing proper names from common nouns[edit | edit source]

Let us consider candidate distinguishing features for proper names:

  • Reference to instances of classes via christening: The one key distinguishing feature is that proper names refer to individual referents that are instances of classes by acts of christening. By contrast, common nouns refer to concepts by (often historically untraceable) acts of christening, and to individual referents by invoking concepts that apply to them. Thus, the referents of a single sense of a common noun have something in common other than "being called X"; they have the concept that applies to them in common, the concept named by the noun. Put differently, proper names are names of individual entities while common nouns are names of concepts. For a common noun to refer to an individual referent, it needs an article. (A concept is also an individual entity in the class of concept, but the distinction still holds true.) That is at least how it works for countable common nouns; the case of uncountable common nouns is a bit different.
  • Recognition of a previously unacquainted instance as belonging to the name: To learn about the meaning of a countable common noun, one can be given examples of its referents and then extrapolate from there. If one has seen some cats, one can recognize a new individual entity that one has not yet seen as a cat. For a common noun such as Peter or London, there is no such extrapolation: each additional Peter or London only shares the name with the other instances.
  • Restriction to concrete objects: Proper names are usually taken to refer to concrete objects rather than abstract objects, especially people, places, and organizations but also less concrete objects such as events. However, names of chemical elements are not considered to be proper names. Names of qualities (e.g. "blueness") are not proper names either.
  • Singularity of reference: this is a relevant yet inconclusive test. Arguably, the universe, the earth, the moon, and the sun are not proper names; they are common nouns referring to singleton classes or concepts. Many grammarians disagree, hence the capitalization of these. Proper nouns generally refer to multiple referents ("Peter", "London") so the test is unclear without further elucidation. Singularity of reference is present in the names of qualities ("blueness") and the names of substances ("gold").
  • Capitalization: this is a relevant yet inconclusive test. In English, adjective "English", common noun "Englishman", adjective "Darwinian" and common noun "Darwinian" are capitalized. Capitalization does have some value in that once something is considered to be a proper noun, it gets capitalized. Thus, capitalization is a hint, albeit an inconclusive one.

Existence of proper names[edit | edit source]

Some raise doubt about whether there is such a thing as proper names. This is caused by definitional and demarcation difficulties. As a general note, there is only one true definition, the mathematical definition. Everything else is the dirty empirical world. Definitions outside of mathematics often leave edge cases undecided and linguistics is no exception.

English proper names have some striking grammatical properties: "The man called" vs. "Peter called" and "I arrived at the city" vs. "I arrived at London". There is no article. Yes, some proper names do take an article, but that does not detract from the observation. Yes, "Peter" can be used as a common noun meaning "A person named 'Peter'", but that does not diminish there being a proper name "Peter".

Yes, ranking names of languages as proper names seems somewhat arbitrary; non-English linguistic traditions often do not do it. One can claim languages to be like substances, such as wood, not concrete objects, and sentences being made from languages as if chair from wood.

Yes, ranking names of weekdays as proper nouns seems somewhat arbitrary; non-English linguistic traditions often do not do it.

Yes, it is not entirely clear why names of taxa are considered to be proper names.

But there is no doubt "Peter" and "London" are proper names. Even "Hague" with its "The" is a proper name; things would be easier without the "the" anomaly, but they aren't. As a general principle, a language shows remarkable order or regularities, without which it would not fit into the fairly small human mind. However, a language also usually contains a heavy dose of chaos or irregularities or anomalies. Anomalies do not refute the order; they are just anomalies. "The Hague" is one such anomaly. For each language, one can think of an ideal language resulting from removal of the anomalies. The ideal or idealized version can be described more compactly than the actual empirical version with all its elements of chaos. Thus, the ideal English would have "Hague" rather than "the Hague".

Name vs. proper name[edit | edit source]

Generally, name is a broader term than proper name; see also section Distinguishing proper names from common nouns.

Names that are not proper names include the names of chemical elements (e.g. "helium"), the names of other chemical substances (e.g. "citric acid") and vernacular names in biology (e.g. "fly agaric").

The relationship between name and noun seems in part unclear. For one thing, by one common construction, noun refers to a single word, whereas name can refer to a multi-word phrase. However, are e.g. "tree", "animal" and "sky" names of something? Are these words names of classes or concepts? But are these words names (as classes, not roles, that is, not names of) in that, would one say '"tree" is a name'? What about "the world"? One contrast is that the word name is often used to refer to a role in a relationship, that is, the name of X, whereas there is no the noun of X.

Multiple terms are formed as phrases using name but not noun, including chemical name, personal name, first name and vernacular name.

Further reading:

Cases[edit | edit source]

In the following, cases or groups of names are considered, whether because they are considered edge cases or whether they seem to deserve separate consideration for other reasons.

The world, the earth, the sun, and the moon[edit | edit source]

The phrases "the world", "the earth", "the sun", and "the moon" can be analyzed as definite descriptions (see below) rather than proper nouns. Thus, the fact that a noun such as "sun" has only a single referent does not automatically make it a proper noun rather than a common noun.

This is especially clear if we consider possible worlds. Thus, in a possible world, the earth can have multiple moons, in which case the phrase "the moon" fails to refer due to the use of the definite article. The fact that we can think like that shows that "moon" refers to a concept or class rather than an individual thing; it is "the moon" that refers to an individual thing, being a definite description using the definite article "the".

Analyzing the phrase "the sun" in a way similar to "the moon" above may be a bit tricky if we assume that each planet including the earth moves around a single sun. However, we do not need to assume the modern worldview, and assume a naive phenomenological worldview instead. Thus, instead of defining "sun" as "mass of gas such and such", we use the phenomenological definition "that which reveals itself as a moving very bright full circle on the sky that gets out of view during the night". Assuming we do not know the nature of that thing that reveals itself, and that it is possibly some kind of object (or even a negative object like a hole) moving around the earth, it is possible to think of a possible world in which multiple objects (possibly negative objects) reveal themselves as a bright full circle moving across the sky. Given this concept of sun, the singularity of sun is no longer necessary across possible worlds, and "the sun" actually referring to something (that is, there being only one thing that reveals itself as such and such) is contingent on this world and similar worlds; thus, "sun" is a concept or a class, possibly non-singleton one, and "the sun" is a definite description.

Multiple analysts reject the above analysis, leading to the capitalization conventions "the Sun", "the Earth", "the Moon", etc. For astronomy, it has practical purpose, since e.g. the concept of moon is extended beyond "that which reveals itself as a certain pattern of light in the sky of the earth" to something like "that which resembles the earth's moon in some essential characteristics, namely by being a non-star that moves around a planet" or something of the sort. Even so, the phrase "the moon" could be taken to refer by default to the earth's moon, but if a text were dealing with, say, Jupiter's moon, the text would want to use the phrase "the moon" to refer to any moon previously picked by context and stored in an analogue of register for "moon". That is, the phrase "the moon" would refer to any individual moon that has been placed into a register associated with the concept or class of moon. However, one could still argue that this does not make the phrase "the moon" a proper noun, but rather that the register of the class of moon defaults to the earth's moon. Alternatively, there could be two kinds of registers, a global register and a local register. The global register for the class of moon would be always non-empty whereas the local register would be sometimes empty. The phrase "the moon" would pick the local register if non-empty, or the global register if the local one is empty. Whether this speculative theory is correct is unclear.

Names of languages[edit | edit source]

In English, single-word names of languages (e.g. "English", "Spanish") are usually considered to be proper names. They are capitalized and used with no articles. By contrast, the phrase "the English language" is not a proper name but rather a definite description pointing to the same referent as the proper noun "English". Moreover, the phrase "English language" (without the definite article) is a common-noun description, not a definite description, referring to "any of possibly multiple languages spoken by the English"; if the English (people) turn out to speak a single language, the definite description "the English language" succeeds in referring to something.

Non-English languages often rank names of languages as common nouns, and write them in lowercase accordingly. Examples are in Wiktionary wikt:Spanish entry, which includes French espagnol, Spanish español, Italian spagnolo, Polish hiszpański, Danish spansk and Swedish spanska. A candidate rationale for this practice is in the following paragraph, likening a language name to a substance name (e.g. "wood", "gold"). Having English and non-English classification language-specific and thereby inconsistent in a multi-lingual dictionary is tolerable.

One could argue that English language name "English" is in fact a common noun, and that one should not be deceived by the capitalization and the lack of article. Since, "Englishman" is a common noun despite being capitalized, so the capital letter could be signaling honor or importance rather than indicating a proper name; as for the lack of article, gold uses no article either. One could argue that a language, an entity with no particular location given a point in time, is something like a substance from which sentences are made, and thus is like gold in some regards. This does not seem to be the standard analysis for English, but it may be the kind of analysis that resulted in many languages having their language names in lowercase.

Names of weekdays[edit | edit source]

English treats names of weekdays (Monday, Tuesday, etc.) as proper names, by capitalizing them, and by using no article with them, as in "Today is Monday". If, by contrast, "Monday" referred to "any day having the rank 1 in a certain periodical numbering scheme of days" as if a common noun, events would take place "on a Monday", with the indefinite article "a". That it is not so seems peculiar from the etymology or morphology of "Monday", since the "day" part suggests "Monday" is some kind of day. "Monday" does not refer to any one particular day (there are multiple days such that each of them is Monday), so what does it refer to? Does it refer to a discontiguous assemblage of days that is a single object? If so, why shall we say "Today is Monday" rather than "Today is part of Monday"? Something strange seems to be going on here.

Non-English languages often rank names of weekdays (Monday, Tuesday, etc.) as common nouns, and write them in lowercase accordingly.

Some of the quandaries pointed out for English seem to apply to other languages as well, e.g. Czech. Thus, in Czech, there is pondělí (Monday), uncountable, and pondělek (a Monday), countable. By being uncountable, pondělí behaves a bit like English "Monday", although Czech has no definite and indefinite articles.

Having English and non-English classification language-specific in a dictionary and thereby inconsistent is tolerable.

Names of taxa[edit | edit source]

Binomial names of biological taxa, e.g. Amanita muscaria, are classified as proper names in Wiktionary. They show singularity of reference and lack of article, but so do names of chemicals. By contrast, "fly agaric" is a vernacular name and a common noun, possibly taking an indefinite article. Present e.g. in the sentence "Amanita muscaria is a gilled mushroom; [...]", Amanita muscaria is used without an article and refers to the taxon rather than an individual organism with a location given a time point. What makes it a proper name is not wholly clear.

Further reading:

Names of principles[edit | edit source]

If principles, theorems and laws are abstract objects, their names are not proper nouns. One has to admit they result from christening an individual entity, even if an abstract one.

One example is "Pythagorean theorem". It is not capitalized as a proper name: that would have been "Pythagorean Theorem" with capital T. However, it is in fact often capitalized as "Pythagorean Theorem" with capital "T" as per Google Ngram Viewer. It very often uses the definite article "the", being written as "the Pythagorean [tT]heorem".

Many such entries are tracked as proper names in Wiktionary.

Names of games[edit | edit source]

Names of board games and card games are often written in lowercase as if common nouns, e.g. chess, go, blackgammon, whist or poker. They take no definite article. This seems to match a somewhat similar case, the name of a sport, tennis or basketball. These names refer, on one hand, to a type of activity, and on the other hand, to a set of rules governing the activity. The activity type is defined by the rules. There is perhaps some similarity between the referents of these names and substances such as gold. However, proprietary modern non-traditional board games and card games are often named by capitalized names, and so are computer games. The capitalization suggests these are considered to be proper names. The treatment seems to be somewhat arbitrary and inconsistent, failing the notion that proper-name-hood can be determined mostly with the use of the ontology of the referent and the manner of reference. On the other hand, some games seem to bear some similarity to an artistic work such as a literary work, a painting, a piece of music or a movie; and names of these are proper names. The ontology depends in part on how narrowly one construes a particular computer game, e.g. whether one considers particular artwork and music as defining, or only the game play, and on what level of abstractness one considers the game play. The games written in lowercase are usually somewhat traditional, have fairly compact or small rules, and do not feature specific artwork, whether visual, auditory or textual.

Names of dances[edit | edit source]

Names of dances such as the waltz or the quadrille are usually taken to be common nouns, despite the singularity of reference. Unlike substance gold, they often use the definite article. Like gold and unlike people and places, a dance has no particular location at a given point in time, being excluded from this class of prototypical referents of proper names. The names of dances are usually also used to refer to pieces of music matching the dance.

Names of works[edit | edit source]

Names of particular novels, poems, pieces of music, paintings, sculptures, movies and computer games are usually considered to be proper names. Their referents do not belong to the most prototypical group of referents of proper names, which are the referents that have a particular location given a particular point of time. Considering novels, each novel can be thought of as an abstract object existing not only in the empirical world but also in the Borgessian library of all possible novels. For novels, it is a particular printed copy of a novel that has a location given a point in time, while the novel itself does not; yet the name refers to a novel, not to its printed copy.

Names of organizations[edit | edit source]

Names of particular organizations including companies are usually considered to be proper names. Their referents do not belong to the most prototypical group of referents of proper names, which are the referents that have a particular location given a particular point of time. Since, in general, an organization is scattered across various sites and locations (as for its buildings), and the employees and agents are scattered as well. On the other hand, organizations, when conceived as aggregates of people, physical assets and their relationships, are locationally bound, and may have more in common with such objects as apples than meets the eye. A fisher's nest is rather sparse, non-rigid, yet shows locational coupling; a group of people and physical assets that are part of the company also show locational coupling.

Names of substances[edit | edit source]

Names of substances such as gold or carbon dioxide are usually considered to be common nouns, despite the singularity of reference. The idea of singularity of reference is obtained by the notion that, say, gold is a single object discontiguously scattered across the world. In any case, gold and carbon dioxide are uncountable and take no definite article.

Names of qualities[edit | edit source]

Names of qualities such as blueness are considered to be common nouns, despite the singularity of reference. Qualities are abstract objects; in particular, they have no location given a point in time. Their names are usually derived from the corresponding adjectives.

Names of people[edit | edit source]

Names of particular people are proper names.

That includes names that refer to multiple people such as first name Martina; what is decisive is that what various referents of Martina have in common is above all the name and not much else. In case of Martina, some intensional characteristics are part of the name, making the matter more complicated: 1) any referent is a human, and 2) any referent is a female.

The case of surnames is similar to that of first names. From the surname one knows the referent is a human. In some non-English languages, the surname form indicates whether the referent is a male or a female, making the surnames behave even more like the first names.

Multi-word names of people such as Albert Einstein have even more appearance of being proper names than first names and surnames, by having a reduced set of referents and by being less often used in a plural. The set of referents can still feature multiple referents. Again, what the referents have in common is above all the multi-word name, and then being a human and the particular sex or gender indicated by the name.

Names of ethnic groups[edit | edit source]

Names of ethnic groups and their members (e.g. the Spanish, Englishman) are considered to be proper names by some. However, the singulars systematically take an article, often an indefinite one, and are regularly pluralized without hesitation, both features pointing to their being common nouns. Moreover, what all e.g. Spaniards have in common is not merely the name as a label but rather their being Spanish, a feature of common nouns. The capitalization can be explained as honorification, imputing honor on the ethnic.

Compared to names of languages, names of ethnic groups in non-English European languages are more often capitalized, as per translations entered e.g. in Wiktionary:Spaniard entry. Nonetheless, such names in lowercase include Bulgarian испа́нец, Estonian hispaanlane, Finnish espanjalainen, Italian spagnolo, Latvian spānis, Romanian spanio, Russian испа́нец, and Spanish español.

These names are sometimes referred to as "ethnonyms".

A multilingual-dictionary can classify these names depending on the linguistic tradition for that language. Alternatively, it may accept one common analysis, which would probably be that they are common nouns given the fairly many languages are writing them in lowercase.

Further reading:

Names of inhabitants[edit | edit source]

Names of inhabitants such as New Yorker are considered by some to be proper nouns. However, such names 1) are not separately coined but rather derived from the names of inhabited places, 2) readily take indefinite article, 3) readily get pluralized, and 4) point to instances or individuals by the intermediary of the shared features, e.g. "Londoner" (name) → person from London (concept or class) → the blonde male with a mustache standing over there (definite description pointing to a particular individual). These four characteristics are typical for common nouns. Moreover, some languages write them in lowercase as per Wiktionary:Londoner entry; these include Danish londoner, Finnish lontoolainen, Hungarian londoni, Italian londinese, Polish londyńczyk, Portuguese londrino, Russian ло́ндонец and Spanish londinense.

Names of inhabitants seem to bear some analytical similarity to names of ethnic groups. One difference is that names of inhabitants are trivially derived from the place being inhabited.

Further reading:

Names of astronomical objects[edit | edit source]

Names of particular astronomical objects such as stars are proper names. Stars are among the prototypical referents of proper names, having a definite location given a point in time.

Further reading:

Brand names[edit | edit source]

Brand names are proper names. Thus, they are words or word sequences. They do not need to start to be used as common nouns in order to become proper names; they are proper names automatically, as if by definition.

Some general dictionaries include brand names. According to brandingstrategyinsider.com, these include Webster’s New World, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, and Random House Unabridged Dictionary.

Further reading:

Capitalization of proper names[edit | edit source]

We already noted that, in English, proper names are capitalized. At the same time, some words that are not proper names are capitalized as well, e.g. the countable common noun Englishman, the adjective Orwellian or the countable common noun Darwinian.

In many non-English languages using the Latin script (e.g. Spanish) or the Cyrillic script (e.g. Russian), proper names are capitalized as well. One may consult Wiktionary London entry to get an idea. In German, all nouns are capitalized, so capitalization is not specific to proper names. In Pinyin romanization of Chinese, proper names are capitalized.

In English, multi-word proper names are capitalized using the title case, most words being capitalized rather than only the first word. Thus, there is a work named Much Ado About Nothing (all words capitalized) rather than Much ado about nothing (only the first word capitalized). An inspection of Wikidata item Much Ado About Nothing reveals that many alphabetic-script languages only capitalize the first word of the proper name.

Further reading:

Proper name definitions[edit | edit source]

A definition or quasi-definition of a particular proper name can be one of the following:

  • A quasi-definition stating the function of the name, e.g. "first name" or "surname". That is not a definition proper: it does not provide any guide on how to get to the referents of the name and it names the name itself, not what it refers to.
  • A common-noun-like definition in the form of a definite description, e.g. "the capital of the U.K.". For each proper name, there is a host of common-noun-like definitions/intensions that apply to it. Each such definition is necessarily wrong from Kripkean rigid-designator point of view: it states something that is not necessarily true of the referent, merely contingently so. The definitions take the Russelian point of view that interpret proper name meanings as descriptions. The definitions choose some properties to list, often partially redundant for identification purposes. The definitions are in fact short encyclopedic summaries, not definitions from a logical point of view. That is fine for the purpose of a dictionary. Interestingly, a similar situation applies to names of chemical elements. The ultimate definition of proper name X is 'that individual entity which has been christened as X'. That, of course, is unhelpful in a dictionary.
  • A common-noun-like definition in the form of an indefinite description, one starting with an indefinite article. There is something suspect about this form: proper names are supposed to refer uniquely and without ambiguity to particular individual objects, for each distinct referent, so why should there be an indefinite article? Merriam-Webster's entry for Orinoco uses no article: "river 1336 miles (2150 kilometers) long in Venezuela flowing from the Brazilian border to the Colombia border and from there into the Atlantic Ocean through a wide delta". By contrast, AHD's Orinoco uses an indefinite article: "A river of Venezuela flowing more than 2,415 km (1,500 mi), partly along the Colombia-Venezuela border, to the Atlantic Ocean." It is not clear why the definition should not be reformulated as follows: "The river of Venezuela that is flowing more than 2,415 km (1,500 mi), partly along the Colombia-Venezuela border, to the Atlantic Ocean." The definite article would suggest that the characteristics stated pick a unique object in this world. Whether they pick a unique object in all possible worlds is perhaps open to debate.

The definite vs. indefinite description quandary applies to definitions of common nouns that name individual objects as well, e.g. to the definition of mercury: why should the definition of the metal start with an indefinite article given the definition is intended to uniquely identify a particular chemical element as an individual object?

A related if somewhat tangential question is why should definitions start with an article at all, including those of common nouns. Since, if "cat" is "a domestic animal such-and-such", then "the cat over there" is "the a domestic animal such-and-such over there", a non-grammatical form via the use of "the a". The conventional indefinite article perhaps matches the conventional encyclopedic defining sentence, in which we say that "A cat is a domestic animal such-and-such" and we say that "Orinoco is a river such-and-such". Nonetheless, to match this form, we could note that the relation in the middle is not "is" but rather "is a", which would get us rid of the article, as if assigning the article to the copula.

Proper name vs. proper noun[edit | edit source]

The concept of proper name is sometimes distinguished from that of proper noun, while at other times, they are taken to be the same concept. When they are distinguished, proper noun is taken to be an phonological or orthographic word, and therefore, "London" is a proper noun while "New York" is not but is a proper name.

Pluralization of proper names[edit | edit source]

Some proper names can be pluralized, by act of which they are grammatically treated as if they were common nouns. Thus, one can use the form "Peters" to refer to multiple 'people called "Peter"'.

Some proper names are plural per default, e.g. the Azores (islands) and the Pleiades (stars).

Proper names vs. definite descriptions[edit | edit source]

Definite descriptions are not proper names. Thus, "the dog over there" is a definite description, uniquely identifying a referent given a context (with the use of the indexical "over there"), but it is not a proper name. "dog over there" is not a definite description, as it lacks the definite article; it is a common-noun description, possibly corresponding to multiple referents/entities. Furthermore, the phrase "the dog over there" may turn out to refer to nothing if 1) there is no dog over there or 2) there are multiple dogs over there, in which case there is no way for the definite article "the" to pick one the multiple dogs as the salient referent of the phrase.

This analysis makes it possible to analyze "the world" as a definite description, part of which is the common noun "world"; the definite article "the" indicates that there is only one thing corresponding to the common noun modified by the definite article. It would follow that neither "the world" nor "world" are proper nouns, the former being a definite description (like "the dog over there"), the latter being a common noun.

The concept of definite description is covered in the following:

Proper names using the definite article[edit | edit source]

Some English proper names use the definite article "the", an example being the Hague. Some of this use seems to be a conventionalized anomaly, an aberration from the grammatical system of the language. A different case are the moon, the earth and the like analyzed in a dedicated section above.

Examples include the Hague, the Nile and the Sahara. These seem to be an anomaly to be learned as a special case, as if the tribal knowledge of the users of the language.

The definite article is often used with multi-word names whose head is a capitalized common noun, e.g. the United Nations, the Atlantic Ocean or the United Kingdom. The rationale could be that, without the definite article, the name has the appearance of being a common-noun phrase, capitalized or not.

Another case is the Philippines and its ilk. In this name, it is implied that there is a quasi-common noun Philippine (one island), and that the group of these is the plural. And since Philippine is as-if a common noun, a definite article is required to turn it into something like a proper name, or at least a definite description. Whether this analysis is correct is unclear.

The phrase the English language is capitalized as if it was a definite description, not a proper name, so that is probably what it is considered to be. And yet, there seems to be some structural similarity between this phrase and e.g. the Indian Ocean, which is capitalized as a proper name. The difference seems to be an arbitrary convention.

Further reading:

The meaning of proper names[edit | edit source]

There is some disagreement in literature on whether proper names have a meaning. What they certainly do have are referents, individual things referred to, denoted or designated.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says that "Proper names are familiar expressions of natural language, whose semantics remains a contested subject."

J. S. Mill says in Wikisource:A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive/Chapter 5: "For, as has already been remarked, proper names have strictly no meaning; they are mere marks for individual objects: and when a proper name is predicated of another proper name, all the signification conveyed is, that both the names are marks for the same object."

As for meaning, there is a sharp contrast between e.g. proper names of places and countable common nouns, but not so sharp one between proper names of places and names of qualities such as "blueness". Since, for countable common nouns, there is the duality between the concept or class denoted and its particular instance referred to by a definite description using the countable common noun. Whereas for names of qualities, the contrast is not so sharp. In particular, "blueness" does not refer to a class of individual objects but rather to an individual object, albeit an abstract one. Thus, "blueness" would appear to be a proper name if it were not for the fact that it refers to an abstract object. Thus, if names of abstract individuals have meanings, it is not clear why names of concrete individuals have none.

Furthermore, what is referred to as meaning can sometimes be referred to as intension or Fregean sense/Sinn, although whether this mapping is perfect is uncertain. Starting from here, we may note the Fregean comparison of proper names Hesperus/Evening Star and Morning Star. These have the same referent/Bedeutung, Venus, but not the same sense/Sinn. Thus, upon Fregean analysis, these proper names do have a meaning distinct from the referent, namely the manner by which the referent is selected or cognitively accessed. Thus, one can associate a defining or essential Russellian definite description with each proper name, and that is an intensional object, a meaning-like object. And this definite description can plausibly be claimed to specify the meaning, different between Evening Star and Morning Star. It is a candidate essential definite description for one of the multiple senses (one per referent) of a proper name that one would find on the definition line in a dictionary. Thus, the denial of meaning to proper names is at least open to debate.

Further reading:

  • Names in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), plato.stanford.edu

Inclusion in general dictionaries[edit | edit source]

General dictionaries often include a range of proper names, while not aiming at a comprehensive coverage of them.

  • Merriam-Webster has over 12,000 geographic names such as London, over 5,500 biographic names such as Darwin, some astronomical names such as Small Magellanic Cloud, some names of organizations such as Red Crescent, and, on the miscellaneous note, Othello, Zeus, Faust, World War I and World War II. See also Wiktionary:WT:MWO.
  • For Oxford English Dictionaries, see Wiktionary:WT:OED.
  • AHD has e.g. Glasgow, Orinoco, Titicaca, Sirius, Darwin, Charles Robert, and Red Crescent; it does not have Greenpeace.
  • Macmillan has e.g. Germany, but not London or Titicaca. It has Jesus Christ as an interjection; it does not have Moses.
  • German Duden has e.g. Japan, Orinoko, Zeus, Martin (first name), He­gel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (philosopher), and Ku-Klux-Klan (organization).

Specialized proper name dictionaries[edit | edit source]

There are specialized proper name dictionaries, including dictionaries of first names, surnames and geographic names.

Dictionaries of first names and surnames:

Dictionaries of person names and place names:

Gallery of proper names[edit | edit source]

Gallery of proper names to give an idea of the range:

  • Astronomical name: Betelgeuse, Sirius, Small Magellanic Cloud
  • Place name: London, New York, the Atlantic Ocean, the Nile, the Himalayas, White House, Baker Street
  • Political entity name: the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, France, Germany, Japan, Korea, China, the U.S., the U.K.
  • Person name
    • First name: Martina, Peter, Matthew, Steven
    • Pet variant of first name: Pete, Matt, Steve
    • Surname: Newton, Einstein
    • Patronymic or matronymics: Sergeyevich, Ilyich
    • Multi-part person name: Albert Einstein, Karl Raimund Popper
    • Nickname of a person: Governator, Orange Man
    • Historical person name: Aristotle, Plato, Aristarchus, Caesar
    • Regnal name: George VI, Charlemagne, Catherine the Great
    • Mythological person name: Zeus, Hera
    • Name of a fictional character: Ungoliant, Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio
    • Music group name: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, ABBA
  • Pet animal name: Bella, Max
  • Person group name
    • Company name: Microsoft, Google, Lufthansa, General Electric
    • Organization name (not company): the United Nations, the Democratic Party, Ku Klux Klan, Greenpeace
  • Language name: English, German, Spanish
  • Work name: Lysistrata, Much Ado about Nothing, Pinocchio
  • Brand name: Kellogg's, Audi, Sempron, Pentium
  • Event name: World War I, World War II, the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, The Great Exhibition
  • Ship name: HMS Beagle, Bismarck
  • Space probe name: Discovery, Pioneer

Applications of the concept[edit | edit source]

One may ask why bother to distinguish common nouns from proper nouns and proper names rather than only use the concepts of noun and noun phrase. By abolishing the distinction, one would get rid of the philosophical and demarcation quandaries. Some applications follow:

  • In lexicography, general dictionaries usually adopt the policy of excluding most proper names. Proper names are considered to be not the kind of generic tool of language that other kinds of words are.
  • In spelling or orthography, someone has decided it was a good idea to capitalize proper names but not common nouns. This was implemented in English and many other languages. If one wants to implement this policy, one needs the concept of proper name. One's capitalization choices are then in part driven by debates about whether a particular item is a proper name.
  • The language learner may want to learn the intricacies specific to proper names. For instance, in German, one may learn from a teacher that while one can hear expressions like "der Martin", that is informal or incorrect since, in German, proper names are in general used without articles. The learner of English may want to pay attention to the subject of proper names, including when to use definite articles, which is semi-regular.

Further reading[edit | edit source]

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