History Main / MeaningfulName

** Ivy calls her drone Ziz, which is the same name of her beloved ''VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog'' {{OC}} that she made when she was younger. Both got their name in turn from the mythological bird Ziz, since they're both capable of {{flight}}.

RealLife examples of this are often referred to as "[[https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptronym aptronyms]]". The magazine ''New Scientist'' refers to it as "nominative determinism" in a tongue-in-cheek manner, and encouraged people to send examples in. (Until they utterly swamped by examples and had to repeatedly beg for readers to stop.) The proper name for this trope is "charactonym".

This goes back to the Bible and probably turns up in the books of other religions, due to the way that names in many different cultures had significance beyond the merely cosmetic.

When additions or alterations to names signify stronger versions of said beings, that's TieredByName. Compare NamedAfterSomebodyFamous, TheyCallHimSword. Contrast with NonIndicativeName. Also compare/contrast with IronicName. See also NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast (which is about names indicating power and villainy and heavily overlaps with this trope), PunnyName (which many of these names fall into) and DeadGuyJunior (when the naming is intended to symbolize a deceased in-universe character's legacy in some way).

* AICronym: An artificial intelligence whose name is also an acronym pertaining to their purpose.
* DescriptivelyNamedSpecies: When an entire species' name fits their physical description.

* "C++" is a computer language that's an improved version of the [[UsefulNotes/TheCLanguage "C"]] computer language. The Meaningful Name, as well as {{Pun}} (if you understand the computer language) kicks in when you know "++" is an affix within "C" that when attached to a variable, ''increases its value''. Thus the name "C++" means "C improved/taken up a notch" -- which it is.

* Franchise/{{LEGO}} in 2001 caused a controversy for using words from the Maori language as ''Toys/{{Bionicle}}'' names without the Maori's approval. The most troublesome was Tohunga, the name of the resourceful villagers. The word literally means craftsman or expert, but unknown to LEGO at the time, Tohunga were real-life traditional medical practitioners who had been discriminated against by Western settlers, thus the word carried a sensitive cultural-historical meaning. Worse, LEGO and Creator/{{Nintendo}} intended to trademark a UsefulNotes/GameBoyAdvance game called ''Tales of the Tohunga'', which nearly lead to a lawsuit. Other borrowed but less sensitive names were Toa (champion, name of the heroes), Turaga (village chief), Kanohi (face, used as masks in ''BIONICLE''), and a collection of others. After the controversy forced LEGO to change a few of these names (most famously Tohunga to Matoran), they began using made-up words. The online games occasionally still took meaningful words from existing languages like Finnish, Egyptian, Hawaiian, Hungarian or Japanese, however when these words were used on products, they at least had their spelling changed. A lot of the made-up names also have clear meanings:

* ''WebVideo/DoorMonster'': ''The Guards Themselves'' has the character Lincoln, who creates pennies from thin air. [[WhatKindOfALamePowerIsHeartAnyway Just pennies]].

As an example, it is common to use for heroic characters names associated with hunting. So, apart from Hunter, which is a valid first and last name in English, you can use a translation to another language (Jäger, or the phonetic Yeager), the name of a predatory animal (Wolf, Hawk), a translation of the latter (Wolfe, Lupin, Lupis, Wulf) or Orion, the constellation of The Hunter. Which is kinda cool, which is why this can double up with AwesomeMcCoolName.