More than a Meds Hub

This study examines aspects of placemaking in the names of Finnish pharmacies through the frameworks of onomastics and cognitive linguistics. Pharmacies are places with multifaceted identities, roles and tasks within healthcare and medicines management, and pharmacy names are company names carrying meanings that can contribute to people’s sense of place. The data set contains 639 pharmacy names. The analysis is based on the functional-semantic method of company names. In Finnish pharmacy names, the most common identifying name part is a place name, usually of a region smaller than a municipality, referring to the physical location of the pharmacy. More than 90% of the names contain at least one index of localness. Some pharmacy names contain lexical items that may evoke images of high-quality service, happiness or health, literally or through metaphors; but only a few names reflect human-centeredness or emotional closeness to people in an explicit manner. The business concept ‘pharmacy’ (apteekki in Finnish, apotek(et) in Swedish) appears in every name. However, in the identifying name part, references to medicines or healthcare are rare. Overall, the names of Finnish pharmacies convey the image of a physically accessible, nearby “neighborhood pharmacy”.