Urbanonym
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The name of an urban element (street, square etc.) in towns and cities.
"Due to the peculiar characteristics of their functioning, urbanonyms are instrumental in forming or transforming the historical memory of society. […] If an anthroponym associated with a denotatum contains all the information about it, the goal of the author of a street name who uses this anthroponym to create an urbanonym consists in foregrounding a certain layer of information about the primary denotatum, from which this name was taken for secondary use."
Example
More examples"Due to the peculiar characteristics of their functioning, urbanonyms are instrumental in forming or transforming the historical memory of society. […] If an anthroponym associated with a denotatum contains all the information about it, the goal of the author of a street name who uses this anthroponym to create an urbanonym consists in foregrounding a certain layer of information about the primary denotatum, from which this name was taken for secondary use."
Etymology
From urban + -onym.
More for "urbanonym"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.