Word.ws English Dictionary

posthumous names

posthumous names is the plural of posthumous name.

Meaning of posthumous name

Noun

posthumous name (plural posthumous names)

  1. (historical) A respectful alias used in Chinese or sometimes more broadly East Asian contexts to refer to a dead person, particularly royalty.
    • The posthumous names of early Chinese rulers were often variations of a few words like "the martial one" 武 (wǔ), "the literary one" 文, and "the filial one" 孝 (xiào), but by the Tang they had become so long that people began using rulers' temple names or era names instead.

Questions about posthumous names

What is posthumous names the plural of?
Posthumous names is the plural of posthumous name.

Words near posthumous names in the dictionary

  1. posthumous execution
  2. posthumous executions
  3. posthumous marriage
  4. posthumous marriages
  5. posthumous name
  6. posthumous names
  7. posthumously
  8. posthumousness
  9. posthurricane
  10. posthybridization
  11. posthybridized

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: posthumous names (page history and authors); posthumous name (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.

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