Necronym

"Necronym" in a Sentence (7 examples)

Some cultures have a taboo against uttering necronyms.

[…] necronym taboo (i.e., a prohibition on saying the names of people who have passed away) […]

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 ...

Often a recently deceased person is referred to circumlocutory by a teknonym or necronym according to their relationship with some living [person].

Each list ends with a necronym: John for Timothy, […]

[…] 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].

An individual takes a necronym, or death-name, when some of his primary relatives die, namely a parent, a sibling, ...

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.