What Is an Eponym? Words That Used to Be Somebody's Name
By the BrainSnail editorial team. How these articles are written and checked, and how to tell us when one is wrong.
A surprising number of ordinary words began as the name of a person, a place or a character, and the process by which a name becomes a common noun is a reliable one. Once a word crosses that line it stops being capitalised, acquires grammar and stops reminding anyone of its origin.
How a name becomes a word
The process is gradual and the stages are observable. A name is first used attributively, so a product or idea is described by reference to the person associated with it. Frequency of use then wears away the connection, particularly among speakers who never knew the person, and the word begins appearing without the reference being intended. Grammatical assimilation follows, with the word taking plurals, verb forms and derivatives that a name would not, which is the clearest sign the transition has happened. Loss of capitalisation generally comes last and varies by editor and by dictionary. The result is a word whose origin is invisible to ordinary users, which is why speakers are routinely surprised to learn that a familiar term was somebody's surname. The same process runs on place names, on characters from fiction and on brand names, and the last of those is legally fraught in a way the others are not.
The categories
Eponyms come from several sources and the type frequently explains the meaning:
- •Inventors and makers, giving words including sandwich, boycott, silhouette, cardigan, mackintosh and diesel
- •Scientists, giving units including the volt, the newton, the pascal, the hertz and the kelvin, which are deliberate honours rather than accidental
- •Medical figures, giving a large number of disease and structure names, many of which are being replaced by descriptive terms for reasons discussed below
- •Places, giving denim from Nimes, jeans from Genoa, tuxedo, marathon, bikini and a great many cheeses and wines
- •Literary and mythological characters, giving quixotic, mentor, panic, scrooge, tantalise and narcissism
- •Brand names that became generic, including aspirin, escalator, thermos and trampoline in various jurisdictions, which happens when a trademark is not defended
The medical retreat
Medicine has been moving away from eponyms deliberately and the reasons are practical and ethical. Descriptive names carry information, so a term stating which structure is affected and how is more useful to a clinician than a surname, and the change reduces error and helps learners. Priority disputes are endemic, since the person named is frequently not the first to describe the condition, and several well-known names are historically wrong. Multiple eponyms for one condition and one eponym for several conditions both occur, which is exactly the problem a naming system should prevent. And several names honour people whose conduct makes the honour objectionable, most notably physicians involved in Nazi medicine, and campaigns to rename specific conditions on those grounds have succeeded in several cases. The counterargument is that established names are entrenched in literature and practice and that changing them creates confusion, which is the same stability argument that appears wherever nomenclature is revised.
The trademark problem
A brand name becoming a generic word is a commercial catastrophe for its owner, since a trademark that no longer identifies a source can be cancelled, and the process is well documented. Aspirin, heroin, escalator, kerosene, zipper, trampoline and yo-yo all lost protection in at least some jurisdictions by becoming the ordinary word for the thing. That is why companies advertise to the public asking them to use the mark as an adjective rather than a noun, and why legal departments write to publishers objecting to lower-case usage, which looks petty and is a genuine defence of a property right. Some marks have survived heavy generic use through sustained enforcement. The linguistic situation is the reverse of the legal one, since a word becoming universal is a mark of success by any ordinary measure, and the owner is in the position of wanting everyone to know the product and nobody to use its name for anything else.
The takeaway
A name becomes a word through attributive use, then frequency wearing the connection away, then grammatical assimilation, with loss of capitalisation coming last. Units honouring scientists are deliberate, while sandwich and boycott are accidental. Medicine is retreating from the practice because descriptive names carry information and several honours are historically wrong or ethically objectionable. A brand becoming generic can lose its trademark.