I've been doing some work on names in the ESV New Testament. I went through the list of 590 and assigned each one into these general categories, as the first step toward more detailed ontology development.
The legend:
Person
Location
Group
Attribute
Other
No surprise that personal names are the largest group, or that the distribution is roughly typical of Zipf's Law, including the fact that approximately half of the names occur only once. It was interesting going through the names that only occur once (singletons) and trying to determine, without any context, what kind of name they are. Think you know your New Testament names? Try your hand at these:
- Porcius
- Timon
- Chuza
- Rephan
- Chios
- Enos
Answers:
1. Person, first name of the procurator of Judea who succeeded Festus, Acts 24:26
2. Person: one of the seven men picked to minister to the church in Acts 6:5. No relation to the Lion King.
3. Person, Herod's steward, whose wife Joanna is one of several women mentioned as followers of Jesus in Luke 8:3.
4. Other: a pagan God connected to Saturn, Acts 7:43
5. Location: an island off the west coast of Asia Minor. Paul's ship anchored here for a night, Acts 20:15.
6. Person: Seth's son, Luke 3:38.
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