Als Arzt, Naturforscher und humanistischer Universalgelehrter befand sich der im 16. Jahrhundert in Zürich lebende Conrad Gessner (1516–1565) an vorderster Front des damaligen Wissens.1,2 Neben seiner Haupttätigkeit als Stadtarzt war er unter anderem auch als Botaniker, Zoologe, Tierarzt, Geograf, Theologe, Philosoph, Bibliograf und Linguist tätig. / A resident of 16th century Zurich, the versatile Swiss physician, naturalist and polymath Conrad Gessner (1516–1565) was at the forefront of the knowledge production of his time. Best known as a botanist and zoologist, his achievements in linguistics are also noteworthy. A major focus of Gessner’s work on languages was the study of the names of plants and animals, individuals, peoples and places. His writings contain hundreds of comments on and explanations of names. Many of them are to be found in the Onomasticon propriorum nominum (1544), in the Bibliotheca universalis (1545) and in the Mithridates (1555). Unfortunately, his work on German personal names, Germanica nomina propria, has been lost. Gessner follows ancient and medieval tradition when explaining names mainly by associating them with other words with a similar sound. As an avid compiler of existing knowledge, he adopts many etymological explanations from other authors. The selection of etymologies from Gessner’s work presented here shows that while he did not always have the right answers to his etymological questions (in fact, he often did not), he was asking the right kinds of questions - although his interpretation of names was limited by a lack of linguistic groundwork so that he was unable to go back far beyond ancient and medieval etymologists. His greatest achievements in this field are perhaps the realization of the importance of names for the comparative study of languages and a recognition of the need for any study of names to start from a comprehensive collection of the material. His work goes far beyond that of his predecessors in terms of his ambition to collect onomastic materials and to analyse them in detail, e.g. regarding compound names. As such, it helped to prepare the ground for what later became the scholarly study of names.