Documentation states that field names can be overriden by using a "name" parameter but Doctrine throws exception. Also there is a missing comma in the documentation between the type and name params. From documentation: http://www.doctrine-project.org/projects/mongodb_odm/1.0/docs/reference/annotations-reference/en#ann_field My source code: Exception: BadMethodCallException: Unknown property 'name' on annotation 'Doctrine\ODM\MongoDB\Mapping\Field'.