Forgotten Word

[Khandro]

I'm trying to remember the word used in connecting something or somewhere named after a person, usually the inventor or discoverer, as in Magellan straits, Washington DC or Biro pens. It identifies the two as 'gives it's name to', or ' from where the name comes'. Help please!

[MarkRae]

Eponymous.

[Khandro]

Whew! Thanks Mark, I lost some sleep over that!

[Quizmonkey]

Be careful how you use it though - most people use it wrongly.

[Khandro]

Mark, Amazingly, half an hour after you post, I made coffee and picked up a back-issue of the TLS and read the following. I've scanned it in for your reward and amusement. Quizmonkey's too;

"As titles go. What's Who? isn't the best.

As a description of what's what in
What's Who?, "an encyclopedic foray into
the world of eponymy" may be worse. But
the book itself - an explanatory dictionary of
inventions, laws, concepts etc named after
people - is fascinating. You are no doubt
better educated than us, and know already
that the high-kicking Tiller Girls were
formed in the 1880s by a Manchester busi-
nessman, John Tiller; that dolomite is named
after the French geologist Dolomieu; that the
decibel derives from Alexander Graham
Bell; that Down's syndrome was outlined in

1866 by John Langdon Down. The diesel
engine we knew of; that it is the child of
Rudolph Diesel we knew not.

On the other hand, we might have bluffed
competently about Biro and his pen, Bewick
and his swan, Bowie and his knife, Phmsoll
and his line, Pyrrhus and his victory, Birdseye
and his fish finger, Davy and his miner's
lamp, Caesar and his section (a Shakespear-
ean invention), Montezuma and his revenge,

Gatling and his gun, Guillotin and his behead-

ing machine. In What's Who?' (Troubador,

£12.50), Roger Jones and Mike Ware explain

all in succinct entries. Until the advent of the

guillotine, for example, only toffs could hope

to be decapitated, while the poor were hanged."