"what's in a name" meaning in English

See what's in a name in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Phrase

Etymology: Coined by William Shakespeare in 1597 in "Romeo and Juliet," act 2, scene 2: : What's in a name? That which we call a rose, : By any other name would smell as sweet. Etymology templates: {{coin|en|William Shakespeare|in=1597}} Coined by William Shakespeare in 1597 Head templates: {{head|en|phrase}} what's in a name
  1. Used to argue that something's name is arbitrary and does not give any information as to its qualities; the names of things do not affect what they really are.

Download JSON data for what's in a name meaning in English (1.6kB)

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  "etymology_text": "Coined by William Shakespeare in 1597 in \"Romeo and Juliet,\" act 2, scene 2:\n: What's in a name? That which we call a rose,\n: By any other name would smell as sweet.",
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      "glosses": [
        "Used to argue that something's name is arbitrary and does not give any information as to its qualities; the names of things do not affect what they really are."
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      "id": "en-what's_in_a_name-en-phrase-E8ImnSz4",
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-01 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.