n. a word or symbol that has or purports to have a reference, but not in virtue of the literal meaning of the expression. `The Holy Roman Empire' is a name rather than a description, since it refers to that political entity, irrespective of whether it is holy, Roman, or an empire. Names are primitive terms in the predicate calculus; in some presentations atomic sentences are primitive and predicates are obtained by deleting a name, while in others predicates are primitive and an atomic sentence consists of the concatenation of a predicate and a name. An atomic sentence is true if and only if the bearer of the name (its reference) satisfies the predicate, and general statements are obtained by replacing the name with a variable and prefixing a quantifier.