What is this?

Welcome to Naṁėṡs! It is an onomasticon of collapsible names.

"Onomasticon" is just a fancy word for "collection of proper names". And a name is collapsible when it is made of two overlapping words. Naṁėṡs itself is a collapsible word. Same as Haġrove or Dreȧṁber.

The dots above (the diacritics) are added for ease of reading.

Why does it exist?

I find it neat.

This began in 2021 when I saw a fantasy map on Pinterest with a forest named "Hagrove".

"Interesting!" I thought. It felt like was looking not at a mere grove with some hags – but the Hag Grove. As if the two words were invented specifically to describe it. Sure, you could re-purpose its parts to describe a troll grove or a hag mire – but that is obviously an afterthought, as the words don’t fit nicely together.

In the same vein, divine or prehistoric entities might speak in rhyme. Not because they're pretentious wordsmiths but due to the sheer gravitas of their presence crumpling and plowing this “new thing”: the language.

What does it offer?

I parsed ~9.000.000 entries of Wiktionary (~17Gb of data) in my search for collapsible names.

Here's the results:

There's also an expended curetad list (over 100 names) plus a search log (~3.5k names) available to buy here. For those who might want to "mine the data" for some gems.

How can you support me?

I'm glad you asked!

If you enjoyed this thing and want to encourage my creative endeavors – here's a button for that.

I'm a game writer and narrative designer with a background in computer science.

Here's some highlights from my blog: