The Greek Alphabet One of the things you'll notice when looking through references, star maps, or anything that might refer to a star, is that stars have names. A common, proper name.
Most stars have at least one type of name, a lot have two types, and some have all three.
Proper names mostly originate from the names that people have called specific stars for a very long time. Sirius, Achenar, Spica and Fomalhaut to name a few. Most of these stars are the ones that stood out, and so are reasonably bright. When astronomy started to become more of a science, astronomers needed to be able to label a larger selection of stars, and giving each star a unique name became inefficient. It also made it more difficult to remember.