Necronym
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The name of a person who has died.
"Some cultures have a taboo against uttering necronyms."
- 2 A substitute name used to refer to a person who has died (instead of the name the person had in life).
"ln some cultures the dead are given a new proper name, known as a "necronym," to avoid breaking the taboo. Necronyms sound to me a great deal like the euphemisms we use, such as "passed on" or "passed away," to say that someone died ..."
- 3 A name or name element which indicates that someone the person was closely related to is dead.
"[…] a Penan may be designated by three sorts of terms: a personal name, a teknonym ('father of so-and-so', 'mother of so-and-so') and, finally, what one feels like calling a necronym, which expresses the kinship relation of a deceased relative to the subject: 'father dead', 'niece dead', etc. The western Penan have no less that twenty-six distinct necronyms, corresponding to the degree of kinship, relative age of the deceased, [etc]."
Example
More examples"Some cultures have a taboo against uttering necronyms."
Etymology
From necro- + -onym; from Ancient Greek νεκρός (nekrós, “death”) + ὄνομα (ónoma, “name”).
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.