When one has an unexpected amount of free time—and very tedious online training to avoid—one’s mind strays onto some odd questions. In this case, what is a true name?

“Knowing names is my job. My art. To weave the magic of a thing, you see, one must find its true name out. In my lands we keep our true names hidden all our lives long, from all but those whom we trust utterly; for there is great power, and great peril, in a name.”

There is power in having and knowing a name, it’s a token of meaning for that concept. So if you are talking about a person it’s a lot easier, and more specific to talk about someone by name than by constructing the concept of that person every time¹. E.g. the tall person over there is open to all kinds of referential ambiguity, but Charlie is fairly specific².

I’ve noticed this idea coming up a lot in things I’ve been reading. In the Earthsea books, Ursula Le Guin has a system of magic where knowing a thing’s true name gives you ultimate power over it. Ged, the archmage of Roke and to some extent hero of the Earthsea books, becomes master of the great dragon just by knowing its name.

You could try to summon things³ at random by just saying all the words available in your language. That’s a huge space⁴ (there are 171,476 words in the OED). There’s something like 10⁸⁰ atoms in the universe⁵, and even if we only name things about the size of a golf ball (8×10²⁷) and we assume that the universe is made of golf balls, then 10⁵² is a good ballpark figure for the number of things that we might need names for.

Even a very simple naming system like IPv6 has [enough names⁶ in it to represent 3.4×10³⁸ addresses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#Larger_address_space). An IPv6 address is 8 four figure hex digits. If there are “15831 syllable candidates” then even if only 10% of them can go together, we could name everything in the golf-ball-universe with unique, 17 syllable words[^anti].

In the Earthsea books, everyone/thing has a use name and a true name. There might be clashes between use and true names, and when you’re asking for a cup of tea, you might summon a demon by accident. If saying something’s true name gives you power over it then a simple name like Ged would put you in real trouble! There must be more to magic than that⁷!

[^anti] Antidisestablishmentarianism is 12 syllables, so a 17 syllable word would be very hard to say⁸. That only takes into account words that are exactly 17 syllables long, if we allow shorter words too, we wouldn’t need as many syllables, and things we name more often could have shorter names, like “I”.

“Locke, in the seventeenth century, postulated (and rejected) possible language in which each individual thing, each stone, each bird and each branch, would have its own name.”

This idea of quantifying a space of all possible names came to me while I was reading The Dispossessed⁹. On the book’s communitarian anarchist world of Urras, everyone’s name is generated by a computer to be unique. Shevek, Bedap, Sabul, all two syllable names. If there really are almost 16k syllables in English, then we could name a population of over 125 million (125 318 196) Odonians before we need a new naming system; probably more than dusty Urras can support.

“Is it true that you get your names from a computer?”

“Yes.”

“How dreary, to be named by a machine!”

“Why dreary?”

“It’s so mechanical, so impersonal.”

“But what is more personal than a name no other living person bears?”

“No one else? You’re the only Shevek?”

“While I live. There were others, before me.”