Namesake

How to spell namesake

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce namesake

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does namesake mean?

1. nounA person or thing that has the same name as another, especially one named in honour of someone.

Namesake in a sentence

• The baby was named after his grandfather, so the old man delighted in his tiny namesake.

• The new café is the namesake of the founder's first shop in Paris.

Where does namesake come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Namesake is a compound that almost certainly grew out of the phrase 'for the name's sake', meaning a person or thing given a particular name out of regard for someone or something else. The second element, 'sake', descends from the Old English word sacu, which originally meant a legal dispute, a cause, or a lawsuit; over time it softened into the modern sense of purpose or benefit that survives in expressions like 'for goodness' sake'. By the seventeenth century the run-together form 'namesake' had settled into English to describe one person named after another, or two people who happen to share the same name. The spelling is reassuringly transparent once you see the two everyday parts, name and sake, locked together with no joining letter. The slight trap is purely in remembering that it is one solid word, not 'name sake' or 'name-sake'.

How the word is built

• name (a designation)
• sake (from Old English sacu: cause, purpose, as in 'for the sake of')