Extract names of objects from list

You can just use:

> names(LIST)
[1] "A" "B"

Obviously the names of the first element is just

> names(LIST)[1]
[1] "A"

Making a small tweak to the inside function and using lapply on an index instead of the actual list itself gets this doing what you want

x <- c("yes", "no", "maybe", "no", "no", "yes")
y <- c("red", "blue", "green", "green", "orange")
list.xy <- list(x=x, y=y)

WORD.C <- function(WORDS){
  require(wordcloud)

  L2 <- lapply(WORDS, function(x) as.data.frame(table(x), stringsAsFactors = FALSE))

  # Takes a dataframe and the text you want to display
  FUN <- function(X, text){
    windows() 
    wordcloud(X[, 1], X[, 2], min.freq=1)
    mtext(text, 3, padj=-4.5, col="red")  #what I'm trying that isn't working
  }

  # Now creates the sequence 1,...,length(L2)
  # Loops over that and then create an anonymous function
  # to send in the information you want to use.
  lapply(seq_along(L2), function(i){FUN(L2[[i]], names(L2)[i])})

  # Since you asked about loops
  # you could use i in seq_along(L2) 
  # instead of 1:length(L2) if you wanted to
  #for(i in 1:length(L2)){
  #  FUN(L2[[i]], names(L2)[i])
  #}
}

WORD.C(list.xy)