The 1989 film True Believer has a character that is a conniving District Attorney named Robert Reynard, and a derelict from the streets named Cecil Skell. Reynard seems to be a reference to Reynard the Fox a character in a very old story, and skell means a vagrant or derelict. Some other names may have such connotations as well though I don’t remember the characters well enough to tell.
Another use of this I recall from Snow Crash with the main character named Hiro Protagonist.
So what is it called when characters are named after other literary characters or have descriptive names like that?
Broadly, it would certainly be some type of allusion. The TV Trope would be Meaningful Name. But it does feel like there is or should be some more on point term for this sort of symbolic naming.
The term I’ve seen used is “nominative determinism”. Though on looking that up, that actually seems to refer primarily to the hypothesis that this really occurs in the real world: That is to say, someone named “Reynard” is more likely, by virtue of his name, to grow up to be conniving.
Also, what were the Lupin family thinking, naming their son Remus? The family name alone is bad enough, but when paired with the first name of a legendary figure raised by wolves, the outcome was inevitable.
I assume that “the names were changed to protect the innocent”: when J. K. Rowling reported what happened at Hogwarts, she changed the names of the characters, spells, etc.
I don’t know if it has reached the status of a real word in widespread usage, but aptronym is a coinage for the “Hiro Protagonist” type of name. I think this fits better in the context of a literary device than nominative determinism, which as @Chronos said has always been used to describe real people who seem to have settled into jobs that fit their name; although aptronym is used this way too.
The “Robert Reynard” type of name is different device, and I think is best described as @ASL_v2.0 said as an allusion, even though that’s obviously a broader term. Perhaps we could coin a more exact term like nominative allusion to refer to this, since it feels like it deserves a specific name.
Something in a work that is meant to be a reference to something else is often called an “Allusion”. I think that would be the general word for what you are looking for.
And just to show off that I do in fact know several words of more than two syllables, antonomasia is a closely related device, a special case of metonymy.
Meaningful name is a pretty broad term that does encompass this.
‘Allusion’ may have been the word I was looking for initially. It seemed fairly broad as I first read this but it fits for a name like ‘Robert Reynard’.
This is good to know in it’s own right. Comes up in real life often.
This is the closest to what I was looking for. Your suggestion of ‘nominative allusion’ is apt. I did think there was likely something for ‘Reynard’ and ‘allusion’ would do it.
But if you look at the link you will see the main term broken down into many sub-categories. Some of which relate to some of your conditions. If there is not a very specific trope for your conditions, you can be pretty sure that there is no very specific literary term either.
Tom Pynchon is an interesting example of an author who uses names in some of the ways described here. Some are apt at a pretty basic, even punny level (Geli Tripping, Tyrone Slothrop, “Mucho” Maas); some are evocative of the character’s nature in a more vague, poetic way (Colonel Tchitcherine, Captain Blicero, Brigadier Pudding); and some seem to be just for fun (Dr. Porkyeovitch, “Pig” Bodine).