 Abelard takes names to be conventionally significant simple words, usually without tense. So understood there are a wide variety of names: proper and common names; adjectives and adverbs; pronouns, whether personal, possessive, reflexive, or relative; conventional interjections such as ‘Goodness!’; and, arguably, conjunctions and prepositions (despite lacking definite signification), along with participles and gerundives (which have tense). Abelard usually, though not always, treats compound names such as ‘street-sweeper’ reductively. Even so his list is not general enough to catalogue all referring expressions. In point of fact, much of Abelard’s discussion of the semantics of names turns on a particular case that stands for the rest: common names. These are at the heart of the problem of universals, and they pose particular difficulties for semantics.