Named

How to spell named

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce named

What does named mean?

1. verbGave a name to someone or something, or identified them by name.
2. adjectiveIdentified or specified by name.

Named in a sentence

• verb

  They named their daughter after her grandmother.

• adjective

  Only the named executor may sign the legal documents.

• verb

  The board named a new chief executive at the meeting.

• adjective

  Police questioned a named suspect about the burglary.

Where does named come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense and past participle of the verb 'name', which descends from the Old English noun 'nama', meaning the word by which a person or thing is known. That noun has deep Germanic roots and close cousins across the family, including German 'Name' and Dutch 'naam', and it reaches even further back to a shared Indo-European source that also gave Latin 'nomen' and Greek 'onoma'. The verb sense, 'to give a name to' or 'to mention by name', was already in use in early English and simply adds the regular '-ed' ending to form the past. Because the base word ends in a silent 'e', the spelling drops nothing and just appends a 'd', so 'name' becomes 'named' rather than doubling any letter. The same root survives in everyday relatives such as 'nominate', 'noun', and 'synonym', all carrying the idea of naming.

How the word is built

• name (Old English nama: a word that identifies someone or something)
• -ed (past tense and past participle suffix)