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This is for programming, a variable name.

I have been thinking and searching and cannot come up with anything. I need a single (non-obscure) word that implies having a name, and description. Ex:

The Foo Name And this is the description part. Goes on and on...

What would I call that pair?

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  • I'm grasping a bit. What do you want to distinguish this well-defined pair from? Something without a name? Would 'defined' do?
    – Bookeater
    Nov 24, 2015 at 19:37
  • @Bookeater I want to distinguish that pair from the normal. What I have is a "name" and a "description" following. To work, though, I need a single word that implies that there is a "item" with name and description of some type. Thinking now, item may work, is there any other word, though?
    – Evan Carslake
    Nov 24, 2015 at 19:44
  • That would be a combination of 'named' and 'described'. 'Specified' is the closest I can come up with linguistically. But you may have more use for a technical term.
    – Bookeater
    Nov 24, 2015 at 19:50
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    Entity is commonly used in Object Oriented design. It is "a thing worthy of a name".
    – user126158
    Nov 24, 2015 at 20:13
  • Can you name it based on the concrete idea, rather than the abstract "name-description / key-value pair" concept that you describe? For instance, if this is the name of a person and their description, call it Person. If this is the name of a book and its description, call it Book. Or is it something more abstract than that?
    – RJ Cuthbertson
    Nov 24, 2015 at 20:50

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Generally, things have names. It's pretty common. As such, I'd recommend calling it describable, modified to fit your language's conventions.

Note also that this might be a symptom of bad programming practices -- generally, if you have something so vague you're struggling to come up with a word for it, you need to step one level down the abstraction tree and be more concrete.

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