Proper names seem simple on the surface. Indeed, anyone unfamiliar with philosophical debates about them might wonder what the fuss could possibly be about. It seems obvious why we need them and what we do with them, and that is to talk about particular persons, places, and things. You don’t have to be as smart as Mill to think that proper names are simply tags attached to individuals. But sometimes appearances are deceiving. I will defend a kind of description theory of names. Yes, I know most philosophers of language take description theories to have been thoroughly discredited and regard Mill, Kaplan, and especially Kripke as essentially right about proper names: names refer directly rather than via any properties they express, and they designate rigidly. Even so, I believe that there is a version of the description theory which, when augmented by certain pragmatic observations, can explain why it seems that names are essentially referring terms, and are “directly referential” (Kaplan) and “rigid” (Kripke). Unlike Millian theories and like other description theories, this version is not threatened by Frege’s and Russell’s puzzles.1 And it can explain the following: • how names are capable of being used in various non-referential ways (a fact Millians tend to ignore); • why proper names are generally used to refer, even though they themselves do not; • the force of Millian intuitions, including the impression of rigidity; • why the individual named, rather than the property the name expresses, ordinarily enters into the (singular) proposition the speaker is trying to convey. I will defend what I call the Nominal Description Theory. I call it “nominal” not because it isn’t really a theory but because it says that when a proper name occurs in a sentence it expresses no substantive property but merely the property of bearing that very name. Although I have defended it before,2 NDT has...