What arbitary systems for naming things have been thought of or used?
September 10, 2013 6:59 AM   Subscribe

Can anyone give me any examples of naming strategies? They can be for buildings, places, people, things, pets, computer files–whatever–but I'd especially like examples where the resulting name is more or less arbitary, ie with as little human choice in it as possible. Examples from fiction are fine, so are cultural, historical or private strategies that people may have used. Any example, basically of a system that delivers a name for something. Thanks!
posted by einekleine to Society & Culture (36 answers total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
The UK's WWII Rainbow Codes? Compare the result for the Germans in the "Battle of the Beams."
posted by Admiral Haddock at 7:04 AM on September 10, 2013 [2 favorites]


You might want to check out this FPP, "What's in a name?"
posted by MonkeyToes at 7:04 AM on September 10, 2013


In Jean Webster's Daddy Long Legs (epistolary novel about a turn-of-the-century orphan who goes to college), she describes the matron of the orphanage naming new babies by working through the telephone book.
posted by Bardolph at 7:10 AM on September 10, 2013


My grandfather was a dairy farmer and had a system for naming his cows. All cows born in a given year would be given a name beginning with the same letter of the alphabet, moving through the alphabet in alphabetical order. So the cow's name would also tell her age, and Flossie was always two years younger than Daisy.

He did skip Q.
posted by ambrosia at 7:11 AM on September 10, 2013 [7 favorites]


Apparently at MIT Sloan the class is separated into orientation groups named after oceans. Atlantic, Indian, Pacific, Baltic, Caribbean, and Mediterranean. (The astute observer will note that half of those are not actually oceans.)

Then those groups are divided once again into subgroups, named after birds.


The campus houses (not dormitories, but the groupings in them) at the University of Chicago are named after alums or professors or people who are connected with the school in some other way. Some of the houses are even double named, hyphenated, for two people who had nothing to do with each other. That's pretty arbitrary.
posted by phunniemee at 7:11 AM on September 10, 2013


You might want to check out the Wikipedia page for naming conventions. Some of them are pretty human-dependent, like, say, the convention in my household for naming networked devices after root vegetables (rutabaga is no longer online, sadly - turnip and carrot live.)
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 7:13 AM on September 10, 2013


Here are some naming systems for computers that I have encountered in real life:

- Geographical features in the British Lake District
- Famous computers from science fiction
- Dead pets previously owned by members of staff, later moving on to Blue Peter dead pets
posted by emilyw at 7:13 AM on September 10, 2013


In the book 10 Kids No Pets, each of the kids was named from the What Should We Name Our Baby book.

1st kid was the 1st name out of the As
2nd kid was the 2nd name out of the Bs
3rd kid was the 3rd name out of the Cs
And so on.

And then they do get a pet, and the kids decide to name her going in the opposite direction, i.e. the last name out of the Zs.
posted by phunniemee at 7:13 AM on September 10, 2013


Oh, also-- in Bleak House there's a soldier character (Matthew Bagnet) whose children are all named after the place the family was stationed when they were born: thus, Malta, Quebec, Woolwich, etc.
posted by Bardolph at 7:14 AM on September 10, 2013


Computer games with name suggestion features typically use some form of Markov chain text generation to create a large number of names similar in feel to a relatively small amount of input text. The basic idea is to take each pair of letters in an input file and track the possible letters that can follow them, either building a table of probabilities or just keeping a list of every letter seen in that position. You can refine the technique by tracking word-initial pairs separately, generating pseudo-morphemes for reuse in the same output, etc.

Another approach is to create a context-free grammar of rules for constructing valid names.

Examples of name generators taking either approach are fairly common on the web.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 7:15 AM on September 10, 2013 [2 favorites]


In Arrested Development Ron Howard's daughters are named after where they were conceived. Bryce Dallas Howard, Rebel Alley. Even funnier considering that Ron has the LEM module in his office and Rebel's son's name is Lem.
posted by phunniemee at 7:16 AM on September 10, 2013 [3 favorites]


There's an Irish naming convention for picking names from family members:

Firstborn son is named for his paternal grandfather.
Second son named for maternal grandfather.
Third son named for his father.
Fourth son named for oldest paternal uncle (father's oldest brother).
Fifth named after second-oldest paternal uncle or oldest maternal uncle.

And then repeated for daughters, with the genders flipped (maternal grandmother, then paternal grandmother, then mother, etc).
posted by specialagentwebb at 7:22 AM on September 10, 2013 [2 favorites]


First thing that sprung to my mind was streetname-conventions in The Netherlands (and probably other countries that don't use a numbering/gridsystem as well).

So you've got the flowerneighbourhood with the dahliastreet, begoniastreet, sunflowerstreet etc. Other examples are themes on composers, rivers, seamen, animals, painters, Indonesian islands, foreign statesmen, royals, poets and birds. Wikipedia tells me that there are parts where the street is simply named after the kind of material that was used to build the road.
posted by Marcc at 7:23 AM on September 10, 2013


My favorite example of this is from the Kurt Vonnegut novel Slapstick. The narrator creates a plan to end loneliness whereby people are randomly assigned middle names consisting of a random noun, some natural thing (such as Daffodil), and a number; if the noun matches, you and that other person are "cousins", and if the noun and number matches, you're "siblings".
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:27 AM on September 10, 2013 [3 favorites]


The computer game "Frontier: Elite II" used algorithmic map generation, so the map effectively extended infinitely far in all directions. Each map sector was created using its coordinate as a random number seed, and the random number generator was used to place stars, figure out their characteristics, and name them. The names were created by using a list of syllables and concatanating three or four of them chosen at random.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 7:28 AM on September 10, 2013


There are various systems out there which will generate random names that fit particular criteria. For example behind the name - for general names corresponding to particular nationalities; character name generator - for Dungeons and Dragons; Wordoid - for domain and business names; Baby Name Genie - purpose self explanatory and fake name generator. The last system provides not just a name but a complete identity - this is a particularly useful for those who are doing things like load testing software applications - the system can provide the names of 100 test users in the blink of an eye.
posted by rongorongo at 7:33 AM on September 10, 2013


I've known small-business (<100 machines) IT guys who used random lists from a world almanac for naming computers. Just names of countries, or lakes, or species of some random type of animal, or whatever, in alphabetical order.
posted by Wretch729 at 7:35 AM on September 10, 2013


You might look at star naming conventions. One of the oldest, the Bayer method divided the sky into constellations. Then stars are named in order of brightest to dimmest in the constellation starting with the Greek letters.

Thus Alpha Centauri=the brightest star in the constellation Centaurus.
posted by vacapinta at 7:36 AM on September 10, 2013




Not everyone in my family tree followed it, but my siblings & I have our middle name character attributed to a generation poem. I'm not sure what the poem even is, but apparently we're the 26th generation...
posted by Seboshin at 7:39 AM on September 10, 2013 [1 favorite]


Ikea products
posted by neroli at 7:44 AM on September 10, 2013 [1 favorite]


Some real estate developers pick a theme and go with it when naming neighborhoods and streets. There's a Ponderosa subdivision in Atlanta with streets called Little Joe Court, Bonanza Drive, and Cartwright Drive. Another subdivision is called Sherwood Forest with streets called Robin Hood Road, Friar Tuck Road, and Lady Marian Lane. Yet another neighborhood is called Argonne Forest with streets named after WW2 battles: Verdun Drive, Marne Drive.
posted by MelissaSimon at 7:44 AM on September 10, 2013


Seven Brides for Seven Bothers had brothers given Old Testament names, alphabetically.
Adam, Benjamin,Caleb, Daniel,Ephraim,Frankinscense and Gideon. Frankincense was chosen as there is no male name beginning with F in the OT.
posted by pentagoet at 7:46 AM on September 10, 2013 [1 favorite]


Ahh, nomenclature.

Apropos of nothing, a friend of mine asked me, "what's a rasp?" I said, "it's like a file except it has holes in it." He let out a protracted "Ohhhhhh!" when the "aha" hit him. He was in the process of porting a text editor written by Rob Pike, which included a data structure called a Rasp: a text file, with holes.

At the same company, all the NFS machines were named *day. It was easy at first: Sunday - Saturday, but they they needed Payday, Holiday, Faraday, etc. Sun workstations in one group were named after dwarfs that should have been (Grubby, Filthy, etc.). When NeXT machines arrived, since they were like nothing else, they were named after polymers (Orlon, Dacron, Rayon, Nylon). Some people named there own workstations, which inevitably led to this conversation to a non-tech person:

"My Sun died this week."
"Oh no! I'm so sorry!"
"That's OK. I'm getting another one and I'm going to name him Bullwinkle."
(look of horror)
posted by plinth at 7:49 AM on September 10, 2013 [2 favorites]


There's the Messier Catalog which started as a list of things in the sky that weren't comets. They just got numbers as he came across them.
posted by Devils Rancher at 7:49 AM on September 10, 2013


I give you the Naming Systems wiki, which is filled with hundreds of examples sorted by number
posted by kelseyq at 8:07 AM on September 10, 2013 [7 favorites]


When I started studying linguistics, I was amused to notice that our computers were all named after Mesoamerican languages except for one, which was named after a breakfast food. Figured whoever set the lab up just had an odd sense of humor.

Several years later, it finally dawned on me that quiche.ling.utexas.edu was named after a language after all.
posted by Now there are two. There are two _______. at 10:04 AM on September 10, 2013 [5 favorites]


The voice of Funes, out of the darkness, continued. He told me that toward 1886 he had devised a new system of enumeration and that in a very few days he had gone before twenty-four thousand. He had not written it down, for what he once meditated would not be erased. The first stimulus to his work, I believe, had been his discontent with the fact that "thirty-three Uruguayans" required two symbols and three words, rather than a single word and a single symbol. Later he applied his extravagant principle to the other numbers. In place of seven thousand thirteen, he would say (for example) Máximo Perez; in place of seven thousand fourteen, The Train; other numbers were Luis Melián Lafinur, Olimar, Brimstone, Clubs, The Whale, Gas, The Cauldron, Napoleon, Agustín de Vedia. In lieu of five hundred, he would say nine. Each word had a particular sign, a species of mark; the last were very complicated. . . . I attempted to explain that this rhapsody of unconnected terms was precisely the contrary of a system of enumeration. I said that to say three hundred and sixty-five was to say three hundreds, six tens, five units: an analysis which does not exist in such numbers as The Negro Timoteo or The Flesh Blanket. Funes did not understand me, or did not wish to understand me.

Locke, in the seventeenth century, postulated (and rejected) an impossible idiom in which each individual object, each stone, each bird and branch had an individual name; Funes had once projected an analogous idiom, but he had renounced it as being too general, too ambiguous. In effect, Funes not only remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it. He determined to reduce all of his past experience to some seventy thousand recollections, which he would later define numerically. Two considerations dissuaded him: the thought that the task was interminable and the thought that it was useless. He knew that at the hour of his death he would scarcely have finished classifying even all the memories of his childhood.
--Jorge Luis Borges, Funes the Memorious
posted by ludwig_van at 10:33 AM on September 10, 2013 [2 favorites]


As a sysadmin at graduate school of environmental studies, I inherited as group of servers named after tree taxonomic names. This included the a DNS server which was awkward to say out loud: pinus.env.university.edu
posted by bendybendy at 10:42 AM on September 10, 2013 [1 favorite]


Greek letters are used in Math & Engineering as symbols for concepts. They're also used in Military nomenclature instead of numbers. Alphabets are very useful for naming things--they have an internal logic of before and after, more and less.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:47 AM on September 10, 2013


Another system is that used in the game Diablo II to randomly name magic item drops (gear that is found or dropped by defeated foes). As you can see from the list, the affixes signify the properties that the items confer onto player abilities, and there are a huge number of possible combinations, especially since the gear that they can modify (weapons and armor) have a large number of varieties. The thing that always intrigued me, though, was the naming convention for rare items (the random drops that had several modifiers); two words, chosen completely at random. I swear that I got one item called "Puke Veil" once; I can't even remember what it did, but come on, Puke Veil.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:54 AM on September 10, 2013


I used to work for a company that named its buildings on one site A, B, C... and on the other AA, BB, CC... It works, but it has flaws - a name like that, or a number, has typos as its Achilles heel and you could be walking around E building for days when you were really supposed to be in D building but someone hit the wrong key.

For any system the object of the game is to figure out the maximum number of items you'll ever need and find a set of names that comes with that many or more. If you know your network is going to have 20 printers on it, but may have twice that many later, an naming randomization system complete with name plaques is less that $5 on Amazon.
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 11:49 AM on September 10, 2013


There's this bit from Oliver Twist:
'We name our fondlings in alphabetical order. The last was a S,—Swubble, I named him. This was a T,—Twist, I named him. The next one comes will be Unwin, and the next Vilkins. I have got names ready made to the end of the alphabet, and all the way through it again, when we come to Z.'
I remember reading a sci-fi short story when I was a kid, but Professor Google isn't helping me find the title or author. There were a group of kids from some kind of future space orphanage on a spaceship together, and all their names were seemingly random consonant-vowel-consonant groups. The two main kids were named Dor and Jir.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:51 AM on September 10, 2013 [1 favorite]


More examples from corporate IT:

Species of fish
Simpsons characters
Greek gods
The phonetic alphabet

One place I worked named their Lotus Notes servers after Lotus car models. As the number of servers grew (and the number of Lotus car models didn't), they branched out into other car brands. I liked working on MUSTANG.
posted by Diag at 3:42 PM on September 10, 2013


nambers, a system for mapping from words to IP addresses, previously on metafilter. Believe it or not, I finally googled it up by searching "256 words ip address frog", because I vaguely recalled the word "frog" having something to do with it.
posted by jepler at 7:29 PM on September 10, 2013 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: All of these are interesting, fantastic answers - thank you!
posted by einekleine at 12:18 AM on September 11, 2013


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