Celebrate Your Name Week

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Celebrate Your Name Week 2008 logo Celebrate Your Name Week.jpg
Celebrate Your Name Week 2008 logo

Celebrate Your Name Week (CYNW) is a holiday established in 1997 by American onomatology hobbyist Jerry Hill. Hill prescribed the first full week in March as a week for everyone worldwide to embrace and celebrate their name and identity and have fun with language.

Contents

As imagined by Jerry Hill, each of the original seven days had a unique focus: Namesake Day, Name Fun Facts Day, Unique Names Day, Learn What Your Name Means Day, Name Tag Day, Middle Name Pride Day, and Genealogy Day. This continues, with Unique Names Day updated to Wide World of Names Day to showcase the diversity of names in our increasingly globalized world.

International Name Day is a complementary holiday devoted to showcasing the fundamental role that names play in society. It takes place on the Monday of each Celebrate Your Name Week.

In 2025, the US-based nonprofit Names Alliance identified promoting the holiday as one of their major program initiatives and compiled archived information to launch a centralized resource. [1] CYNW encourages people participate in names-related hobbies, activities, and to take part in entertaining and enlightening names-related events. Its aim is to help people develop a true fondness for and genuine appreciation of names.

History

In his childhood, Hill heard of a child who was killed in his city. The child was also named Jerry Hill. This and other occurrences made Hill increasingly curious about names, and Hill's intrigue with names grew as years passed. To celebrate an ever-developing interest in names, in 1999 Hill established a website, Jerry Hill Presents Names (JHPN), [2] which became popular and was linked from the Public Broadcasting Service website in 2001. [3] The website's popularity forced it to expand twice due to heavy bandwidth. The website received over a quarter million visits. [4]

The Jerry Hill Presents Names website and its mission inspired Hill to establish Celebrate Your Name Week, in 1997, [5] [6] and to create a website for it. [7] The site contained ideas for participating in various names-related events and activities.

Celebrate Your Name Week has been included yearly in the international publication Chase's Calendar of Events . [8]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Names Alliance website".
  2. ↑ ""Jerry Hill Presents Names"". Archive.org. Retrieved 8 January 2026.
  3. ↑ "PBS - POV: The Sweetest Sound: Resources". PBS . Archived from the original on 2002-10-02.
  4. ↑ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2007-07-08. Retrieved 2007-05-23.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  5. ↑ "Celebrate Your Name Week website".
  6. ↑ Bowman, Sis (4 March 2017). "What does a name matter anyway?". Times Recorder. Retrieved 8 January 2026.
  7. ↑ "Archived 2015 Names Universe website". Archived from the original on 2014-01-18.
  8. ↑ Chase’s Calendar of Events 2006, p. 164.
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