| Onomastics is a branch of linguistics that studies the origins and forms of the names of persons or places and their naming and practices in order to find out the cultural insights and linguistic characteristics revealed in names. Onomastics is a multidisciplinary discipline. It involves semantics, morphology, etymology, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, history, cultural studies, religion, philosophy, etc. This paper studies the origins, categories of names and naming practices in both the United States and China and compares the differences in naming practices by analyzing the result of a survey about the percentage of traditional elements on naming practice in four different periods of the 20th century.Chapter One is a general introduction to the term of onomastics. Chapter Two discusses the history of onomastics and the current studies by scholars both at home and abroad, and puts forward the studying direction of the author in this paper. Chapters Three and Four respectively discuss the histories, categories, structures, naming practices and gender information in both the United States and China.Chapter Five studies and analyses the percentage of English biblical names in the four chosen periods of time in the 20th century, namely 1925-1935, 1955-1965, 1975-1985 and 1995-2000, on the basis of data and statistics from government websites and Social Security Administration in the United States to see the influences of traditional elements in naming practices. The study of Chinese name is according to a survey conducted in 2005 to 100 Chinese citizens to see the percentage of generation names in the hoping of finding out the influences of traditional elements on naming practices.Chapter Six is what is called, in usual terms, the part of conclusion. This part summarizes the main findings and limitations of the present study and puts forwards some issues or points that deserve attention in further studies for the author or for other scholars in the study of this area.
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