thumb|Portuguese mariner Bartolomeu Dias named the ("cape of the storms") in southern Africa but the king [[John II of Portugal renamed it ("cape of good hope").|alt=A cape and a beach seen from above.]] A noa-name is a word that replaces a taboo word, generally out of fear that the true name would anger or summon the force or being in question. The term derives from the Polynesian concept of Noa, which is the antonym of Tapu (from which derives the word taboo) and serves to lift the tapu from a person or object.
thumb|Portuguese mariner Bartolomeu Dias named the ("cape of the storms") in southern Africa but the king [[John II of Portugal renamed it ("cape of good hope").|alt=A cape and a beach seen from above.]] A noa-name is a word that replaces a taboo word, generally out of fear that the true name would anger or summon the force or being in question. The term derives from the Polynesian concept of Noa, which is the antonym of Tapu (from which derives the word taboo) and serves to lift the tapu from a person or object.
A noa-name is sometimes described as a euphemism, though the meaning is more specific; a noa-name is a non-taboo synonym used to avoid bad luck, and replaces a name considered dangerous. The noa-name may be innocuous or flattering, or it may be more accusatory.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).