Abstract

The use of Niels Bohr’s principle of complementarity is becoming increasingly important for research in various fields of knowledge. About 10% of the settlements of Starodub before the revolution had paired names: formal, rational and the second, a popular, imaginative, descriptive. Paired series of oikonyms are considered as another manifestation of the principle of complementarity, which allows a more complete description of the object name. After the revolution, a system of additional place names was deliberately destroyed.