named

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past tense and past participle of name.

   The explorer named the river after his patron.

   She was named team captain before the season began.

   Note

   Much of this form's work is done in the passive: her dog is named Lucky, my nephew is named after his grandfather. In that frame it sits close to called, and named after is the usual way to say whose name was passed on. Because name can take two objects, the active (they named him captain) keeps its second object in the passive: he was named captain.

2. 2
   adjective

   Having a name.

   Every named storm this season caused some damage along the coast.

   The contract protects all named parties equally.

   Similarspecified, designated

   Oppositeunnamed

3. 3
   adjective

   An argument passed to a subroutine by its name in the calling code, rather than by its position.

   Passing a named argument let her supply the values in any order she liked.

   The function signature made each named parameter's purpose obvious at the call site.

   Oppositepositional

   Note

   A programmer's term that only makes sense beside its opposite, positional. Every parameter has a name, so named here is not the everyday adjective. It describes how a call matches each value to its parameter: by writing the name out rather than relying on order. It turns up almost always in the pairs named argument and named parameter, and its payoff is a call that labels itself.

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