Namesake  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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Namesake is a term used to characterize a person, place, thing, quality, action, state, or idea that has the same, or a similar, name to another

Examples of namesakes

Popular culture

• James Bond (after Ian Fleming's favorite ornithologist James Bond)
• Woody Allen (for his favourite jazz musician Woody Herman)
• The teddy bear (after Theodore Roosevelt)
• The Nintendo mascot, Mario (after Mario Segale)
• Daughtry (for its frontman, Chris Daughtry)
• Van Halen (for its founding brothers Eddie & Alex Van Halen)
• The Jackson 5 (later known as The Jacksons) (for its members Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon, Michael, Randy, Rebbie, & Janet Jackson)
• Hanson (for its members Isaac, Taylor, & Zac Hanson)
• Fleetwood Mac (for its members Mick Fleetwood and John McVie)
• Bon Jovi (for its frontman, Jon Bon Jovi)
• Guns N' Roses (for its lead vocalist Axl Rose and former guitarist Tracii Guns)
• Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band (after band leader Bruce Springsteen and E Street in Belmar, New Jersey)
• Footballers Lionel Messi and Christiano Ronaldo are named after Lionel Richie and Ronald Reagan respectively.

Scientific terms

• ohm named after Georg Ohm, similarly curie, volt, farad, hertz, watt, henry, kelvin, and many other electrical, physical, and chemical terms.
• Gibbs free energy (after Josiah Willard Gibbs)
• Michaelis-Menten kinetics (after Leonor Michaelis and Maud Menten)
• Von Neumann architecture (after John von Neumann)

Sports

• The Stanley Cup (after Frederick Stanley, 16th Earl of Derby)
• Heisman Trophy (after John Heisman)

Commercial products and entities

Professional examples

• Pope
• Regnal name

Namesake Cataloguing

Casual or accidental identification of personal namesakes can occur in daily life via a number of sources, including: telephone directories, newspaper births/deaths/marriages announcements, dictionaries of biography, internet search engines, etc.

There are some notable examples of deliberate searching for and identification of non-related personal namesakes.

• Starting with a drunken wager, British Comedian Dave Gorman used a wide variety of methods to find namesakes, an exercise which then evolved into a 2001 stage show "Are You Dave Gorman" and which was subsequently made into a book and television series [1].
• US actor/filmmaker Jim Killeen used the Google search engine to find personal namesakes for his 2007 documentary "Google Me"

See also

• Code name, word or name used clandestinely to refer to another name or word
• Cognomen, inherited name
• Protected Geographical Status, product target name sourced to protected geographical name
• Scientific phenomena named after people
• Homonymy
• Paronymy
• Disambiguation