On January 4, 2024, the American Name Society continued its long-standing tradition and conducted the Name of the Year selection (NoY). The 2023 online vote was chaired by ANS President, Laurel Sutton, and ANS Information Officer, Brandon Simonson. This report gives a summary of this year’s NoY deliberations and offers readers background information about some of the onomastic nominations and decision-making.

For more than a decade, the American Name Society has singled out an outstanding article to be given the Best Article of the Year Award. To select the publication to receive this prestigious honor, each member of the Editorial Board independently reviewed all of the articles that had been published in 2023. As per ANS tradition, obituaries, notes, editorials, book reviews, and articles contributed by the Editor-in-Chief were excluded from consideration. To make their decision, Board Members were asked to select the publications which they felt possessed the highest degree of creativity; demonstrated the best writing style; employed the soundest research methodology; and had the greatest potential to make a lasting and significant contribution to onomastics. This report details the results of that selection process and reveals the 2023 winner of the ANS Best Article of the Year award.

References Brezianu, Andrei and Vlad Spânu. 2007. Historical Dictionary of Moldova. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press. Brustein, William. 2003. The Roots of Hate: Anti-semitism in Europe before the Holocaust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Evans, R. J. W. 2006. Austria, Hungary, and the Habsburgs: Central Europe c. 1683–1867. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Farkas, Tamás. 2012. "Jewish Name Magyarization in Hungary" E-Journal of the American Hungarian Educators Association 5:1–16. Farkas, Tamás. 2015. "Changing Names as Abolishing the Difference: Personal Names as Ethnic Symbols, Characteristics of Surname Changes and the Magyarization of Surnames in Hungary". Létnük 3:27–39. Gammerl, Benno. 2018. Subjects, Citizens and Others: Administering Ethnic Heterogeneity in the British and Habsburg Empires, 1867–1918. New York: Berghahn Books. Heppner, Harald. 2020. "A Review of Empty Signs, Historical imaginaries: The Entangled Nationalization of Names and Naming in a Late Habsburg Borderland". Austria History Yearbook 53:234–235. Ioanid, Radu. 1996. "Romania" in The World Reacts to the Holocaust, edited by David S. Wyman. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Judson, Pieter M. 2016. The Habsburg Empire: A New History. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Maitz, Péter, and Tamás Farkas. 2015. Der Familienname als Nationalsymbol: Über den Untergang deutscher Familiennamen im Ungarn des 19. Jahrhunderts. [The Family Name as a National Symbol: The Demise of German Family Names in 19th Century Hungary]. Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik 36:163–196. Mihok, Brigitte and Richard Levy. 2005. "Romania (1878-1920)" In Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution, edited by Richard Levy. New York: ABC-CLIO, 617–619. Mitchell, A. Wess. 2018. The Grand Strategy of the Habsburg Empire. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Nick, I. M. 2022. "Nazis, Lies, and Lullabies: A Case Study of Charactonyms in the National Socialist children's Book Trau kein Fuchs auf grüner Heid". NAMES: A Journal of Onomastics 70, no. 4: 43–57. Nick, I. M. 2019. Personal Names, Hitler, and the Holocaust: A Socio-Onomastic Study of Genocide and Nazi Germany. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Rennick, Robert. 1970. "The Nazi Name Decrees". NAMES: A Journal of Onomastics 18, no. 2: 65–88. Pesty, F. 1864. Pesty Frigyes helnévgyüjteménye, 1864–1865: Széföld és térsége [Friges Pesty's Collection of Toponyms, 1864–1865: the Szeklerland and the Surrounding Environs]. Budapest: Székely National Museum of Romania. Pesty, F. 1864. Pesty Frigyes kéziratos helységnévtárából, 1864: Bihar varmegye [Friges Pesty's Place Name Directory of 1864: Bihar]. https://mek.oszk.hu/01700/01776/. Varga, Bálint. 2016. The Monumental Nation: Magyar Nationalism and Symbolic Politics in Fin-de-siècle Hungary. New York: Berghahn Books. Vermes, Gábor. Hungarian Culture and Politics in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1711-1848. New York: Central European University Press. Viragh, Daniel. 2014. Becoming Hungarian: Jewish Culture in Budapest, 1867-1914. PhD. dissertation, University of California Berkeley. Accessed August 10, 2023. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4gn0m7zd

For more than a decade, the American Name Society has singled out an outstanding article to be given the Best Article of the Year Award. To select the publication to receive this prestigious honor, each member of the Editorial Board independently reviewed all of the articles that had been published in 2022. As per ANS tradition, obituaries, notes, editorials, book reviews, and articles contributed by the Editor-in-Chief were excluded from consideration. To make their decision, Board Members were asked to select the publications which they felt possessed the highest degree of creativity; demonstrated the best writing style; employed the soundest research methodology; and had the greatest potential to make a lasting and significant contribution to onomastics. Then, in a secret ballot, the Board members cast their votes. This report details the results of that selection process and reveals the 2022 winner of the ANS Best Article of the Year award.

On January 23, 2023, for the 16th year in a row, the American Name Society (ANS) held its annual conference of the American Name Society. The 2023 online vote was chaired by Deborah Walker, the former ANS Name of the Year (NoY) Coordinator. This report gives a summary of this year’s NoY deliberations and offers readers background information about some of the leading onomastic nominations.

Each year, the Editorial Board of NAMES reviews the articles that have been published in the journal to select winners for its prestigious Best Article of the Year Award. In 2021, the deliberation process was delayed due to COVID. However, throughout the Winter and Spring of 2023, the members of the Editorial Board carefully reviewed all of the articles that appeared in the four issues of NAMES released in 2021. Publications were assessed for scientific innovation, academic writing style, research methodology, and overall potential to make a significant and lasting contribution to the field of onomastics research. After the votes were tallied, four publications clearly emerged as winners.

In 1936, Elvira Theodolinde Bauer, a German kindergarten teacher and would-be graphic artist, wrote and illustrated a picturebook that would eventually become a classic of anti-Semitic children’s literature. Entitled Trau keinem Fuchs auf grüner Heid und keinem Jud bei seinem Eid! [Trust neither a fox on a green heath nor a yid upon his oath!]1 (Bauer 1936), the work was published and distributed by the infamous Nazi propagandist and publisher Julius Streicher—the Führer of Franken and the producer of the incendiary anti-Semitic weekly, Der Stürmer. After providing historical background on Streicher, Bauer, and the poisonous fruit of their literary collaboration, this article examines how character names in Trau keinem Fuchs were used to plant misinformation about and sow hatred against Jewish people living in the Reich. As this article also shows, by utilizing the names of real-life victims of Fascism, Bauer’s fairy tales effectively blurred the line between fact and fiction for adult and child readers alike. The article ends with a discussion of the urgent need for more research into the ways hate groups, past and present, use names to indoctrinate new members, both great and small.

The ubiquitous image of the sprawling 19th century Southern plantation has meant that much of the research on US slave names has focused on regions below the mid-Atlantic (Desrochers 2002). The resulting lack of attention that has been given to other times and spaces has necessarily limited our collective understanding of slave naming patterns. The purpose of the current investigation is to help address this geo-temporal oversight. With that goal in mind, the present empirical study explores the naming patterns of fugitive slaves as advertised in newspapers published in New York and New Jersey between 1730 and 1790. Using the techniques of corpus linguistics, this investigation analyzed 147 runaway slave advertisements featuring 150 slave names. These onomastic exemplars comprised four name-types: first names, surnames, nicknames, and aliases. Onomastic patterns were identified using descriptive statistics as well chi-squared and Fisher’s exact tests. Special attention was paid to exploring the relationship between the runaways’ names and their reported age, gender, and racial classification. After a brief introduction to slavery in the New England colonies, this study presents the empirical results and compares them with previous findings on US slave names. The paper concludes with a discussion of the limitations and argues for more corpus-based research into slave names.

This special distinction is given to a new scholar whose work is judged by a panel of onomastic researchers to be of superior academic quality.

In 1936, Elvira Theodolinde Bauer, a German kindergarten teacher and would-be graphic artist, wrote and illustrated a picturebook that would eventually become a classic of anti-Semitic children's literature. Entitled Trau keinem Fuchs auf gruner Heid und keinem Jud bei seinem Eid! [Trust neither a fox on a green heath nor a yid upon his oath!]1 (Bauer 1936), the work was published and distributed by the infamous Nazi propagandist and publisher Julius Streicher-the Fuhrer of Franken and the producer of the incendiary anti-Semitic weekly, Der Sturmer. After providing historical background on Streicher, Bauer, and the poisonous fruit of their literary collaboration, this article examines how character names in Trau keinem Fuchs were used to plant misinformation about and sow hatred against Jewish people living in the Reich. As this article also shows, by utilizing the names of real-life victims of Fascism, Bauer's fairy tales effectively blurred the line between fact and fiction for adult and child readers alike. The article ends with a discussion of the urgent need for more research into the ways hate groups, past and present, use names to indoctrinate new members, both great and small.

The fifteenth annual Name of the Year vote was held during the online annual conference of the American Name Society on January 23, 2022. The vote was chaired by Deborah Walker, the ANS Name of the Year Coordinator, and was attended by 23 international onomasticians. This report provides a summary of the deliberations and gives background information about the onomastic nominations.