What you call 'atom' is actually called 'symbol' in Lisp. Keywords are in Common Lisp a subset of symbols, those who are in the package 'KEYWORD'. Keywords also

What you call 'atom' is actually called 'symbol' in Lisp. Keywords are in Common Lisp a subset of symbols, those who are in the package 'KEYWORD'. Keywords also have themselves as value. Thus keywords evaluate to themselves. 'atom' means something else: 'not cons'. Anything that is not a cons cell (the two-pointer building block of linked lists) is an atom: numbers, characters, strings, symbols, arrays, ... Thus a string is an atom, too. CL-USER 1 > (typep "foobar" 'atom) T CL-USER 2 > (typep 4 'atom) T CL-USER 3 > (typep 'foobar 'atom) T CL-USER 4 > (typep '(foo . bar) 'atom) NIL True though, symbols (not atoms) are often used as keys for key/value data structures like assoc lists, property lists, hash tables, CLOS instances and others. Common Lisp also allows symbols to have arbitrary names. It uses | and \ as escape characters in symbols. CL-USER 11 > '((person |Marvin Minsky|) (|KNOWN FOR| |Artificial Intelligence Research|) (lab |MIT AI Lab|)) ((PERSON |Marvin Minsky|) (KNOWN\ FOR |Artificial Intelligence Research|) (LAB |MIT AI Lab|)) CL-USER 12 > (setf mm *) ((PERSON |Marvin Minsky|) (KNOWN\ FOR |Artificial Intelligence Research|) (LAB |MIT AI Lab|)) CL-USER 13 > (assoc '|KNOWN FOR| mm) (KNOWN\ FOR |Artificial Intelligence Research|) Symbols are by default interned in a special data structure and are looked up at read-time. Thus they are compared by pointer identity. In Common Lisp this data structure is called a package and there can be more than one package.