Many cultures have taboos and traditions associated with referring to the deceased, ranging from at one extreme never again speaking the person's real name, bypassing it often by way of circumlocution,[1] to, at the other end, mass commemoration via naming other things or people after the deceased.
In Ashkenazi Jewish culture, it is a custom to name a child after a beloved relative who died as a way of honoring the deceased.
[5] In Assyria and Babylonia, children were often given "substitute-names," necronyms of deceased family members, to keep the dead's names and identities alive.
[2] During the Cold War, necronyms were commonly used as a means of protecting an intelligence officer's true identity.
One such example is the case of Shigechiyo Izumi (1865?–1986), accepted in 1986 as the world's oldest man by The Guinness Book of World Records; it is suggested that he was possibly born in 1880 and the birth certificate of a brother whose name he assumed upon his death was submitted in place of Izumi's own.