Placeholder name

[1] Placeholder names for people are often terms referring to an average person or a predicted persona of a typical user.

In their Dictionary of American Slang (1960), Stuart Berg Flexner and Harold Wentworth use the term kadigan for placeholder words.

Edgar Allan Poe wrote a short story entitled "The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.

Something-stan and its demonym something-stani, where something is often profanity, is commonly used as a placeholder for a Middle Eastern or South Asian country/people or for a politically disliked portion of one's own country/people.

Podunk is used in American English for a hypothetical small town regarded as typically dull or insignificant, a place in the U.S. that is unlikely to have been heard of.

Another New Zealand English term with a similar use is Waikikamukau ("Why kick a moo-cow"), a generic name for a small rural town.

Similarly, the name "unobtainium" is frequently used for a material of highly desired characteristics which does not exist or which would be prohibitively expensive to mine, procure or synthesize.