namesake
Americannoun
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a person or thing named after another or whose name is given to another person or thing.
Little Dora lay asleep in the arms of her namesake, great-aunt Dora.
The memory of Robert and Signe McMichael is honored in their namesake, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection.
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a person or thing having the same name as another.
The cities of Hyderabad, Pakistan, and Hyderabad, India, are namesakes.
noun
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a person or thing named after another
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a person or thing with the same name as another
Etymology
Origin of namesake
First recorded in 1640–50; alteration of name's ( name + 's 1 ) sake 1
Explanation
If your parents named you after your Great Uncle Abner, then you are his namesake. The two of you share a very nice name. Use the noun namesake to describe the recipient of a handed-down name, like Bob Jr., or Ricky Smith III. Less often, the word also means anyone who shares a name with someone else, so you could refer to all the Emmas in your school as namesakes. The first recorded use of the word namesake was in the mid-1600s, and it probably began as the phrase "for the name's sake," before being condensed into a single word.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
A new Blu-ray set presents immaculately restored versions of 20 cartoons from Fleischer Studios and its namesake siblings, Dave and Max Fleischer.
From The Wall Street Journal • May 27, 2026
Yardeni Research namesake Ed Yardeni even has a name for the phenomenon: “In our view, today’s economy is not K-shaped but rather G-shaped,” he writes.
From Barron's • May 27, 2026
Long before the modern GPU, computer-science legends like Alan Turing and Claude Shannon — the namesake of Anthropic’s large language model — used chess to model human logic and cognition.
From MarketWatch • May 23, 2026
As for Vox, the company announced Wednesday that it was selling its profitable podcasting business, New York magazine and its namesake site Vox.com to James Murdoch’s Lupa Systems.
From MarketWatch • May 20, 2026
Stonesnake moved as fast as his namesake, leaping down on the wildlings in a rain of pebbles.
From "A Clash of Kings" by George R.R. Martin
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
