An archetypal name is a proper name of a real person or mythological or fictional character that has become a designation for an archetype of a certain personal trait. It is a form of antonomasia.
Archetypal names are a literary device used to allude to certain traits of a character or a plot.
Literary critic Egil Törnqvist mentions possible risks in choosing certain names for literary characters. For example, if a person is named Abraham, it is uncertain whether the reader will be hinted of the biblical figure or Abraham Lincoln, and only the context provides the proper understanding.
A name may also be an identifier of a social group, an ethnicity, nationality, or geographical locality.
Some of the names below may also be used as ethnic slurs.
In French, the Latin-derived word for the fox () was replaced by , from Renart, the fox hero of the Roman de Renart (originally the German Reinhard).