# Naming Relationship

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/naming-relationship/98852>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [July 18, 2006, 5:19pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/naming-relationship/98852 "2006-07-18T17:19:54Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![jmckible](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/c4cdca/32.png) [@jmckible](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jmckible)\
**Post date:** [July 18, 2006, 5:19pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/naming-relationship/98852/1 "2006-07-18T17:19:54Z")

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This is not a technical question persay, but since rails is all about  
opinions, I figured it was worth asking:

Now that CRUD is on people’s minds as a way to design webapps, I’m  
wondering if anyone has put thought into a naming convention for  
relationships. Some relationships have good terms, like User -\>  
Subscription -\> Magazine. I’ve found working with more abstract model  
objects (abstract in that they don’t actually model real world things)  
don’t usually have good relationship names.

Tacking ‘ship’ onto the end of words seems popular. Author’s have  
Authorships, etc. Sometimes this sounds nice, but sometimes it doesn’t.

In my case, I have model objects Product -\> View -\> Filter -\> Group -\>  
Tag. All of them have a many-to-many relation between their neighbors.  
These terms don’t make sense together in any situation outside of my  
app. So I could name the relationship between Views and Filters  
as…Viewship? Filtership? I ended up going with a ViewFilter object.

What do you think? How are you naming your less obvious relationships?