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onomancy

Onomancy is an old-fashioned kind of fortune telling based on a person's name. If three women with the same name sit at a table, one of them will be married within the year. Believe it or not, that’s onomancy.

The belief in a connection between luck and a person's name is an old one. During the heyday of onomancy, a fortune teller might ascribe meaning to the number of vowels in your name or the total number of letters. It was also common to give each letter a number value, and to add up the total number of a person's name. Onomancy comes from the Greek onoma, "name," and manteia, "prophecy."

Definitions of onomancy
  1. noun
    divination by the letters of a name
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    type of:
    divination, foretelling, fortune telling, soothsaying
    the art or gift of prophecy (or the pretense of prophecy) by supernatural means
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