to call oneself
100
3.7
- phrasal verb
- /kɔl wʌnˈsɛlf/
:
llamarse
- And they started calling themselves the Night Stalkers.
Examples
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They call themselves the Noble Men and they may be coming here to Fillmore.
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Father: Listen to me, Walter, or whatever you want to call yourself: don't embarrass the family today!
Fiction book (1997) -
I mean... what did you call yourself again?
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How do you even call yourself that?
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You wanna call yourself an artist?
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Together they call themselves The Four Horsemen.
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That's what they call themselves.
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I can't get used to calling myself queer.
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Wendy Stephens, @wsstephens, the librarian at Buckhorn High School in New Market, Alabama, calls herself an eclectic Anglophile.
Academic text (2011) -
She describes herself as a writer because she loves to tell stories and call herself one.
Synonyms
119
2.0
Say your name and a little about yourself when you meet someone new
43
5.3
To show yourself as a certain kind of person to make others think that way
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly and compositionally derived from 'call' (to name or refer to) combined with the reflexive 'oneself', so 'call oneself' straightforwardly means to refer to or name oneself. This reflexive naming construction is common across languages (e.g., Spanish 'llamarse', French 's'appeler'), so a B1 learner who knows both constituents will readily understand the phrase.
Etymology
Call oneself comes from the simple image of naming yourself: imagine someone in a mirror saying 'I call myself a writer', literally using call to give a name to oneself. That's why call oneself means 'to describe or refer to oneself'.