The dictionary definition I find of parsing has it as a synonym of syntatic analysis and does indeed refer to analyzing a string of symbols, but if the underlying syntax is as simple as Forth ... tokens and separators with the tokens referring to tags if they are present in a dictionary, if not referring to numbers under the current base, ... then the location and the length of the token is much of the syntactic analysis that is required.

Forth 200x PARSE-NAME then is an action to implement the syntactic analysis required for the default syntax, working well with whitespace by skipping leading delimiters, and Forth94 PARSE is an action to support additional syntax to terminate a substring in the string of symbols by defining an explicit terminator, while allowing for empty substrings by not skipping leading delimiters.

In any event, neither Forth94 PARSE nor Forth200x PARSE-NAME have an abort or error on delimiter not found, but both implicitly take the end of the input buffer as matching any parsing delimiter, so if there is an abort on the delimiter not found, perhaps it's best to not call it PARSE or PARSE-NAME to avoid confusion.



Is that pluck as in chicken feathers or pluck as in a harp string?

Given that the Forth style syntax is just slicing up the input buffer into tokens, I like SLICE if you want to name it in terms of the action or TOKEN or STRING if you want to name it by the result it is going to give.