(no subject)

[sallymn]

innominate [ih-nom-uh-nit]

adjective:
having no name; nameless; anonymous

Examples:

Vice Chief Justice Ann Timmer, in her written opinion for the court, explained that Cochise County, Arizona, uses 'innominate juries' to conduct all criminal jury trials. Both prospective and impaneled jurors are referred to by number in all open-court proceedings (Colleen Murphy, State High Court Upholds Constitutionality of Keeping Jurors Anonymous During Voir Dire, Law.com, June 2022)

The story of Psarolepis and Achoania teaches us two lessons. First, we should beware reconstructing primitive ancestral forms based on the appearances of descendants, all of whom may have lost the features of even more primitive creatures: and second, we should beware the sound of rats in the walls, scurrying downwards into regions of innominate terror. (Henry Gee, Time's deep secret, The Guardian, March 2001)

Patients remain ciphers, reduced to bare kneecaps and slack torsos. Their innominate faces are obscured or cropped from the frame, either out of a reflexive deference to HIPPA privacy laws or as an acknowledgment of the difficulty, if not total impossibility, of having one’s humanity honored within the grinding machinery of the American health-care apparatus. (JDJ, Sharon Madanes , Artforum, August 2022)

Then, from a dimension that must be a little lower than all others, a little nearer the ultimate nadir of hell, I called the innominate beings who posed for this new figure-piece. (Clark Ashton Smith, 'Hunters from Beyond')

And though it was but an image without even the semblance of life, she felt unmistakably the presence of something alive in the temple, something so alien and innominate that instinctively she drew away. (C L Moore, 'The Black God's Kiss')

They went to the kitchen area where three Hispanics stirred something in large vats and turned innominate meat on a grill. (Margaret Truman, Murder in Havana)

Origin:

Late Latin innominatus, from Latin in- + nominatus, past participle of nominare 'to nominate'; first known use 1638 (Merriam-Webster)

Comments

[prettygoodword]

Translating nominare as to nominate seems to miss the point. I mean, yeah, it can also mean that, but surely to name is the relevant sense.

[sallymn]

I had trouble finding anything to cite - you can always tell when I can't (because the word is a little too esoteric maybe but I don't want to give it up) when it is really scrappy...