means The act of giving a name to a person, place, thing, or idea — assigning the word by which it will be known.

from From Old English 'nama,' the noun for a name, which sprouted the verb 'namian' (to name) and from there the gerund 'naming.' It belongs to a deep Germanic family — German 'Name,' Dutch 'naam' — and reaches all the way back to the Proto-Indo-European root '*nomn-,' the same ancient seed behind Latin 'nomen' and Greek 'onoma.' Across thousands of years and dozens of tongues, the word for 'name' has barely changed its shape, as if the very act of naming were too fundamental to be renamed.