Onomastic
Demonstrations
The following examples show how Mondonomo technology applies to onomastic research. Click any demo to explore the underlying data interactively.
Etymology Tracing
Follow a name's roots across languages and time periods through the etymology graph.
Explore "Alexander" →Cross-Script Variant Identification
Find all script and language variants of a name token using transliteration models.
Explore "Александр" →Geographic Distribution
Explore where a name is most common and how it varies by country.
Explore "María" →Research Projects
Specialised research surfaces built on MondoGraph — each focused on a particular slice of the world's names.
Named by God — global biblical onomastics
Subproject 01 · International Biblical Onomastic Society
A large-scale research and publishing project dedicated to the systematic study, mapping, and dissemination of biblical personal names. The intellectual core is a rigorously structured corpus of 2,365 biblical names, each treated as a unit of cultural transmission — original scriptural form in Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic; phonetic transliterations; etymological trajectory; narrative role across 35,003 indexed Bible verses; and differentiated spread across 202 countries and 12 writing systems.
The comparative orthographic layer comprises 20,540 attested spelling variants — the most comprehensive multilingual register of biblical name forms assembled to date. Distribution data challenges the assumption that biblical nomenclature is a Western phenomenon: Brazil alone hosts an estimated 119M bearers, followed by India (116M) and Mexico (100M).
Published volumes · bilingual country pairs
From the Black Forest to the Bible Belt
German–English · 333p
From the Adriatic to the Vistula
Croatian–Polish · 333p
From Lilies to Lotuses
Thai–English · 333p
From Eagle to White Eagle
Polish–English · 333p
From Alter to Torri Gate
Croatian–Japanese · 333p
Biblical Baby Names Encyclopedia
A Cross-Cultural Guide · Marcus Paterson
Sacred Names Across the Pacific
Korea–United States · Marcus Paterson & Jayden Yoon
Formalised Etymology
Subproject 02 · Semantic Network for Name Etymology
A typed semantic network — Form, Etymon, Concept nodes; twelve edge predicates — that turns prose etymological knowledge (dictionary entries, Wiktionary, scholarly footnotes) into machine-queryable structured data. A user searching for 김 learns it romanizes to Kim, traces to Chinese 金 ("gold"), shares a Wikidata concept with Japanese キム, and is carried by ten million people in the corpus — all in one query.
The network currently covers 2.7M+ name roots linked across language families. Etymology is the basis for the cross-language universality scores visible in the Explore page.
Explore etymology graph →Publications
Peer-reviewed and preprint papers directly relevant to the onomastic programme. Click Quick preview to read in-page.
Navigating Linguistic Similarities Among Countries Using Fuzzy Sets of Proper Names
Davor Lauc · Names: A Journal of Onomastics, vol. 72 · 2024
The foundational onomastic-method paper — fuzzy-set similarity over forename inventories across 88 countries recovers known linguistic families and surfaces surprising diaspora affinities.
Towards Analysis of Biblical Entities and Names using Deep Learning
Martinjak, Lauc & Skelac · Int'l Journal of Advanced CS & Applications, vol. 14, no. 5 · 2023
Applied NLP and social-network centrality metrics to the Gospel of Mark across three translations — the methodological seed for the Named by God project.
The Formalization of Multilingual Etymologies into Semantic Networks
Davor Lauc, Tomislava Lauc, Vjera Lopina · DH Benelux 2024, Leuven · 2024
Methodology behind Formalised Etymology — turning prose etymological knowledge into a typed graph with Form, Etymon, and Concept nodes.
Ukrainian Names and Their Geographic Distribution
Davor Lauc · Mondonomo Research · 2024
Analysis of Ukrainian given names and surnames using the Mondonomo corpus — geographic spread, cross-border variants, and diaspora distribution.
Collaborate with Us
We are looking to collaborate with researchers, linguists, and onomasticians on:
- Corpus contribution and data sharing
- Model validation and benchmarking
- Joint publications in computational onomastics