The Name "Black Hole": A History of the Term and Its Entrenchment in Physics

This paper traces the history of the emergence and entrenchment of the term “black hole” in physics. It shows that the first ideas about bodies that do not emit light appeared as early as the 18th century (John Michell, Pierre‑Simon Laplace) under the name “dark stars”. After the creation of general relativity, Karl Schwarzschild (1916) described a singularity, but the object had no stable name. In the mid‑20th century, variants such as “collapsar”, “frozen star”, and the cumbersome “gravitationally completely collapsed object” were used. The decisive role was played by John Wheeler. In 1967, at a conference, he proposed calling these objects “black holes”, and in 1968 he fixed the term in print. Alternative versions of the origin of the name (Ann Ewing, 1964; a prompt from Robert Dicke) are discussed. The reasons for the term’s success are analyzed: conciseness and vividness, emotional charge, cultural context (the era of space exploration), as well as “marketing packaging” that attracts media attention and funding. Wheeler himself acknowledged that the name is misleading (a black hole is not a hole but a region of spacetime). The author of this paper consistently uses the term “collapsar”, considering “black hole” a successful but physically misleading brand. The article is part of a series of methodological works by the author on the language of physics and is embedded in the broader context of research on collapsar entropy.