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The award went to Professor Søren Wichmann and Lennart Chevallier for their groundbreaking article “Mapping Place Names”, published in Names: A Journal of Onomastics (Vol. 73 No. 2, 2025). The American Name Society (ANS), one of the world’s oldest scholarly societies dedicated to the scientific study of names and naming practices, bestows this annual prize on the article its editorial board believes has made the most significant contribution to onomastic research.
Innovating Toponymic Research with Data and Software
In their award-winning paper, Wichmann and Chevallier demonstrate how large-scale toponymic data can be analyzed using modern computational tools. Drawing on the global GeoNames database, the researchers developed the “toponym” package for the statistical programming environment R.
Their article contrasts two approaches to studying place names. The traditional philological approach focuses on individual names and their etymologies, while a more modern pattern-seeking approach examines multiple names together to uncover broader geographical and linguistic trends. Through this framework and the use of large datasets, they argue, scholars can gain new insights into the spatial patterns and historical processes that shape naming systems worldwide.
To illustrate the power of this methodology, the authors include two case studies: one on the place names of the Xincan language area in Guatemala and another on Slavic toponyms in eastern Germany. These examples show how computational analysis can complement traditional name research and open new avenues of inquiry for onomasts everywhere.
A Milestone for Onomastic Scholarship
The Best Article Award has been a tradition of the American Name Society since the early 2000s and recognizes outstanding scholarship that pushes the boundaries of name studies. Articles are assessed on criteria such as originality, methodological rigor, clarity of presentation, and potential impact on the field.
For the University of Kiel’s ROOTS research cluster and its partners, the award is a notable recognition of the growing importance of interdisciplinary methods in onomastics - especially those that integrate digital humanities, geospatial data, and computational linguistics.
Looking Forward
This accolade highlights a promising trend in onomastic research: the use of big data and software tools to analyze naming patterns across large geographic areas. As global name datasets - from online gazetteers to historical registers - become increasingly accessible, computational approaches promise to enrich our understanding of how names emerge, spread, and shift over time.
Congratulations to Søren Wichmann and Lennart Chevallier for their contribution to advancing the scientific study of names and for receiving one of onomastics’ highest honors.
