Lexico-Cultural Variations in Product Naming: A Note on the Names of Handcrafted Soaps

Abstract

This comparative study examines the names of handcrafted soaps, a group of natural products that has become popular among environmentally conscientious consumers in recent years. In particular, 339 names of US-based handcrafted soaps (US-HS) and 324 names of Taiwan-based shou gong fei zhou ‘lit. hand craft soap’ (TW-HS) were analyzed and compared. The findings show that plant and food names predominate in HS names and reflect the cultural and herbal preferences in both regions. In addition, colorful, allusive, and novel coinages were found to be frequent among US-HS names. By comparison, function-denoting words were mainly found among TW-HS names. This study provides insights into potential cross-cultural variations in consumer product naming.

Keywords:

• product names
• soap
• plant names
• phytonymy, Asia

Note

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For clarity and stylistic purposes, lowercase letters are reserved for italicized Chinese terms and common plant names in English, but capital letters are used for the actual soap names in English.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lindsey N. H. Chen

Lindsey N. H. Chen is an Associate Professor of General Linguistics at the National Taiwan Normal University. Her areas of interest are language and culture, onomastics, and semantics.