name names

present singular third person names names · participle present naming names · participle past named names · past named names

1. idiomaticTo identify specific people, especially people involved in misdeeds or other secretive activity.

   They named names—names which I shall not record here.

   1918, Henry B[lake] Fuller, On the Stairs, Boston, Mass.; New York, N.Y.: Hougton Mifflin Company; Cambridge, Mass.: The Riverside Press, →OCLC, part V, section III, page 164

   3 more examples

   "Pr'ythee, peace, man," said Avenel; "what need of naming names, so we understand each other? [...]"

   1820 March, [Walter Scott], chapter X, in The Monastery. A Romance. […], volume II, Edinburgh: […] Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, […]; and for Archibald Constable and Co., and John Ballantyne, […], →OCLC, page 307

   He named names; the whole gang was rounded up, and all were sentenced to two years in reform school.

   1953 May 25, “West Germany: Panthers in the Streets”, in Time

   Sometimes it is not the journalist who is in peril but the subject of a story, and naming names can leave both the reporter and the reader uneasy.

   2008 May 18, Clark Hoyt, “Journalism From the Bottom of the Boat”, in New York Times, retrieved 16 Jun 2011

   Synonyms: inform, grass up, snitch, bewray, blow the whistle, clepe, denounce, dime