This section introducing onomastics is rather freely adapted from an article by John Algeo, a linguist at the University of Georgia, published in 1992 (Algeo, John, 1992).
Onomastics is the study of names, including their forms and uses, especially the names of persons, e.g., George, Bush, George Bush, and places, e.g., Summit, London, 47 East South Temple Street, the White House (also the person occupying it). Although a name may be given to anything, the place-name and the personal name have received the most attention in onomastics. The study of place-names, i.e., toponymy, is closely allied to geography, history, and related disciplines. The study of personal names, i.e., anthroponymy, is related to genealogy, sociology, and anthropology. Another subdiscipline is literary onomastics, which examines the use of names in literature, and often focuses on the names of characters in fiction, i.e., characternyms. A primary requirement of onomastics is the clarification of certain basic terms relating to the concept of a name. In casual usage, people often take names, proper nouns, and capitalized words to be the same thing. The investigator, however, will be misled by mixing these three terms; these three expressions refer to three different partially overlapping concepts. A distinction between them is fundamental to onomastics. This introduction discusses these terms from three linguistic points of view: semantic reference, grammatical analysis, and orthography. It also has a little bit to say about names as they relate to the cultural process of naming.