Word.ws English Dictionary

name names

name names verb: to identify specific people, especially people involved in misdeeds or other secretive activity.

Verb

name names (third-person singular simple present names names, present participle naming names, simple past and past participle named names)

  1. (idiomatic) To identify specific people, especially people involved in misdeeds or other secretive activity.
    • "Pr'ythee, peace, man," said Avenel; "what need of naming names, so we understand each other? [...]"1820 March, [Walter Scott], chapter X, in The Monastery. A Romance. […], volume II, Edinburgh: […] Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, […]; and for Archibald Constable and Co., and John...
    • They named names—names which I shall not record here.1918, Henry B[lake] Fuller, On the Stairs, Boston, Mass.; New York, N.Y.: Hougton Mifflin Company; Cambridge, Mass.: The Riverside Press, →OCLC, part V, section III, page 164

Synonyms of name names

24 more synonymsFewer synonyms

All synonyms of name names

Forms of name names

third-person singular presentnames names
present participlenaming names
past participlenamed names
pastnamed names

Questions about name names

What does name names mean?
Name names means to identify specific people, especially people involved in misdeeds or other secretive activity.
What part of speech is name names?
Name names is a verb.
What is the past tense of name names?
The past tense of name names is named names.

Words near name names in the dictionary

  1. name dropping
  2. name droppings
  3. name drops
  4. name for
  5. name it, claim it
  6. name names
  7. name of the game
  8. name one's poison
  9. name part
  10. name parts
  11. name plate

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: name names (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-name names.ogg.

Cite this entry: “name names.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/name_names. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.