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What’s your name? Maybe you were named for your mom or dad, or for someone else in your family. Many families name babies after an older relative to honor him or her and to carry on the person’s name. Sometimes places and things are named in this way, too—to honor a person or event, or to keep an important memory alive. Words like this, in which people’s names are used to form new words, are called eponyms. Eponym is a Greek word that means “to give one’s name to something.”

Both the Chinese and Japanese languages have more than one system of writing. This means that there could be more than one way to write the word hello! Because the writing systems used in these languages are quite different from the one used in English, some words are spelled in a few different ways. This often happens when people try to spell a word from another language the way it sounds in their own language.