Nomenclators

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Individuals who assign or use specialized names or terms in a system of naming ; secretaries or officials who register and manage names or records for identification purposes ; scholars or writers who study or devise a structured vocabulary or terminology within a particular field
2. Persons responsible for creating, compiling, or explaining catalogues of names ; clerks or announcers who maintain official lists of names for governance or ceremonial contexts ; experts engaged in the classification and usage of naming conventions or terminologies in academic or professional settings
3. Agents or experts who designate and organize names within a formal naming framework ; functionaries who document and announce names, often in administrative or political roles ; specialists focused on the development and application of nominal systems for classification or reference

Etymology: The most striking fact about this word is how literal its first job was. In ancient Rome, a "nomenclator" was a slave whose task was to whisper the names of people to his master, so that a politician working a crowd could greet each citizen by name. The Latin compound joins "nomen," meaning "name," with "calare," meaning "call together" or "summon," which gives the sense of a person who calls names out in order. The sense then broadened. Over the centuries the word came to cover officials who kept formal lists of names and ceremonial announcers who read them out, and later people who compiled and explained the terms used in a field. Each step kept the core idea of a person who knows names and makes them available to others. The plural "nomenclators" simply follows the regular English pattern for words of this kind, so it describes more than one such person.

Synonyms: namers, designators, classifiers, catalogers, indexers