eponymous
adjective
Did you know?
What’s in a name? If the name is eponymous, a name is in the name: an eponymous brand, café, river, or ice cream is named for someone or something. And because English is beastly sometimes, the one lending the name to the brand, café, river, or ice cream can also be described as eponymous. This means that if Noah Webster owns a bookstore called “Webster’s Books,” it’s an eponymous bookstore, and Noah himself is the bookstore’s eponymous owner. Most of the time, though, we see eponymous describing a thing named for a person—for example, an eponymous brand named for a designer, or a band’s eponymous album titled only with the band’s name. The related word eponym is less ambiguous: it refers to the one for whom someone or something is named. At our hypothetical “Webster’s Books,” Noah Webster is the bookstore’s eponym. Appropriately enough, the Greek root of both words is onyma, meaning “name.”
Examples of eponymous in a Sentence
Leila Hadley, Give Me the World, (1958) 1999
"Cool Britannia," which goes back to Ben and Jerry's eponymous ice cream in Spring 1996, met its sell-by-date within weeks …
—Harold Perkin, Times Literary Supplement, 18 Dec. 1998
Karen Hubert Allison, the eponymous (if you count middle names) creator of Hubert's, didn't know she was making dining history …
—Peter Kaminsky, New York Times Book Review, 11 May 1997
Manon Bischoff, Scientific American, 21 Mar. 2025
Stella is an iconic fashion designer with an eponymous brand, and she's partnered with everyone from Adidas to Taylor Swift, even being the creative director for Team Great Britain during the 2012 and 2016 Olympics.
—James Mercadante, EW.com, 21 Mar. 2025
The Stonewall Inn, a functioning bar and the site of the eponymous six day uprising in 1969, was designated as a national monument in 2016 by then-President Barack Obama.
—Melissa Kravitz Hoeffner, Forbes, 20 Mar. 2025
Europe’s wine industry is the latest to find itself in the crosshairs of a possible trade spat with the U.S.
Among those concerned is David Levasseur, a third-generation wine grower and owner of a Champagne house in France’s eponymous region.
—Alex Turnbull, Chicago Tribune, 20 Mar. 2025
See All Example Sentences for eponymous
Cite this Entry
“Eponymous.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/eponymous. Accessed 28 Mar. 2025.
Copy CitationMedical Definition
eponymous
adjective
R. O. Brady
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