Onomasiology is the branch of lexicology that departs from a concept or a referent and asks for the names that are or should be bestowed to it by different speech communities (and their history). Many, if not all, professional linguists talking to the layman will hear questions like "how can or should people express X, and why?" Onomasiology is thus at the heart of humans' interest in language. In the realm of professional onomasiology the following problems arise. Due to the rich quantity of modern linguistic working material (such as dialect dictionaries, thesauri minutely compiled corpora etc.), onomasiological studies, more than ever before, can and must investigate small dialect areas in a detailled way in order to gain valuable insights into the processes of naming and name-changing. On the other hand, the wider view that fuses the results from the detail studies should not be neglected–especially with regard to new universal findings of cognitive linguistics. In addition, an important task of modern societies is information and knowledge management, which includes the question of how to put, or transfer, knowledge into language (including expert-layperson communication). However, large projects cannot always be pursued by a single person, and therefore countless small articles are scattered over the huge mass of linguistic and anthropological literature, not always easily detectable. Onomasiologists therefore need either good bibliographies, an encyclopaedia, or some type of coherent linguistic data base.
Onomasiology Online, an online journal founded in March 2000 and edited by Joachim Grzega and Alfred Bammesberger since 2006 also by Marion Schöner (all from the Katholische Universität Eichstätt), originally started as an historically-oriented journal and the majority of articles still belongs to this field. However, OnOn also aims at contributing to the needs of information and knowledge management and likes to encompass studies relevant to this issue, too. The ultimate goal of our journal is to offer a vast collection of onomasiological detail studies from a vast number of languages and cultures which can then serve for drawing comparisons between different linguistic and cultural groups. Everyone working in the field on historical and synchronic lexicology, historical and synchronic pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, and translation sciences is therefore warmly invited to submit (even short) contributions (cf. style sheet).
Apart from publication in individual volumes, all articles are also stored in the OnOn Encyclopedia. Connected to this is search engine, by means of which the data base of articles can be searched for the following criteria: author, language/dialect studied and concept/referent. Every article in the encyclopedia receives a unique alphanumerical identification number of the type "[last name][index]-[year]/[serial number]". This enables easy citation, e.g.: "Grzega, Joachim (2000), "Red in Rhaeto-Romance", in: Onomasiology Online s.v. Grzega1-00/1" or with the number of the volume: "Grzega, Joachim (2000), "Red in Rhaeto-Romance", in: Onomasiology Online 1 s.v. Grzega1-00/1" or "Grzega, Joachim (2000), "Red in Rhaeto-Romance", in: Onomasiology Online 1: 15-20". In the data base the articles will be ordered in this alphanumerical way. Volumes are not published on a regular basis, and it is not necessary. It will depend on how many contributions we receive.
In order to ensure the quality of the contributions, articles submitted will first be refereed by the editors or consulting editors. The board of consulting editors already encompasses important names, but is still rather limited. Colleagues interested in co-operating with the editors of OnOn are therefore more than welcome and are asked to contact Joachim Grzega.