A word that points, and a word that weighs
In ordinary English, a name is the word or short phrase that picks out a person, a place, a thing, or an idea and keeps it distinct from others. The noun does more work than that. A good name is a reputation. A name in a field is a well-known person. To call someone names is to insult them. The matching verb is just as broad: you name a child, name a date, name the capital of a country, or name someone to a committee. That spread can look like modern slang piled onto a simple label. Most of it is older than the slang. English did not import the core word from French or Latin. It inherited it and then stretched the inherited senses.
Kept from Old English
The origin of the word name is native Germanic stock. Old English already used nama, with a by-form noma, for the designation of a person or thing and for the standing that went with being known. The record begins in the Old English period, before 900. The verb is equally old. Namian meant to give a designation, to mention someone by it, and to appoint. Beside it stood another native verb, nemnan or nemnian, with much the same job of calling and designating.
The noun passed into Middle English as name. A western and southern variant nome also appears. The old n-stem ending wore away, the long vowel of the Middle English form later diphthongized, and the modern pronunciation followed. None of that path needs a Romance loan as a middle step. The short everyday word stayed in the Germanic line while learned relatives arrived later by other doors.
Old English grammarians could also use nama for a noun, the part of speech that names things. Latin nomen did the same double duty. In Modern English that grammatical sense did not win: the ordinary word for the part of speech is noun, a later arrival. The older overlap still shows how tightly the idea of a label sat inside the inherited meaning.
A Germanic noun with a wide family
Old English nama comes from Proto-West Germanic namo, and that from Proto-Germanic namo, an n-stem noun. Close relatives remain easy to see. German has Name, Dutch naam, West Frisian namme, Gothic namo. The North Germanic branch is a little more surprising at first glance. Old Norse has namn beside nafn. The f is not an extra flourish. It is a dissimilation: two n-sounds in one word were pulled apart, and the second became f. Icelandic still has nafn. Swedish keeps namn. Danish and Norwegian Bokmål have navn. English name and Icelandic nafn therefore look less alike than English name and German Name, yet they are the same Germanic noun at different stages.
Behind the Germanic forms sits a Proto-Indo-European noun with the same basic sense. Older handbooks write it as no-men or nomn. Later work often reconstructs h1nomn, while other accounts argue for an initial h3 or for an ablauting paradigm whose exact shape is hard to recover. The disagreement is real and worth stating plainly. Greek onoma and onyma look as if they began with a rounded vowel. Hittite laman has an l where other languages have n, probably from a sound change that avoided two similar consonants in one word. Armenian anun can be read more than one way. What is not in doubt is the family resemblance. Latin nomen, Sanskrit naman, Old Irish ainm, and Slavic forms such as Russian imya all point to one ancestral vocabulary item for the act of designation.
English later brought some of those cousins in through learned channels. Noun comes from Latin nomen by way of French. The combining form -onym in synonym, anonymous, and patronymic is Greek. Nomen itself survives in legal and scholarly English. Those are doublets and near-doublets of the native word. They are not its parents.
From a label to fame, and from fame to a brand
The oldest English senses already mix the label with the social fact of being known. Reputation is not a late metaphor bolted onto a dry technical term. By about 1300, Middle English uses the noun for what people commonly say about a person. Around 1400, a man of name is a person of distinction. By the 1610s the noun can mean a famous individual, the person rather than the word. The phrase in the name of, used for authority or on someone’s behalf, is in place by the late fourteenth century.
Newer uses keep riding the same track. As a modifier meaning well-known, name is attested by the late 1930s. Name brand follows in the 1940s. Name-dropper is a mid-twentieth-century formation, but it only makes sense because the noun had already come to mean a person worth mentioning. The verb kept a parallel life. Modern name still covers giving a designation, citing someone, and appointing, which is why a witness can name names and a government can name a minister with the same verb that names a baby.
What the cousins make visible
A concrete takeaway sits in those later learned forms. Everyday name never left the Germanic line that runs from Proto-Germanic namo through Old English nama. The schoolroom word noun, and the Greek piece -onym, are later arrivals that happen to share the same Indo-European ancestor. If the native word and the Latin one still feel related, that is not because English borrowed name. It is because both languages kept an old designation-word and English then borrowed the Latin one a second time, under a different shape, for grammar and for scholarship.