What does your name mean? | FIRST NAMES EXPLAINED

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What do names like Marcus and Margaret Literally mean. How did the Anglo-Saxons pick their names? And what names will be popular in 20 years' time? From saints and gods to plays and pop culture, we'll find out why there are so many Johns and Jennifers, Marys and Martins, Bobs and Barbaras in this name. themed episode of Words Unraveled.

Welcome to another Words Unraveled. I am Robert William Watts from the YouTube channel RobWords. And I am Jessica Elizabeth Zaferis, the author of etymology books including Useless Etymology. And today we are talking about names just like the... ones that we told you just now aren't we robert like the ones that we possess that's right jessica specifically we're going to talk about uh first names given names christian names however you like to

refer to them. We'll do surnames another time. There's so much to go at with first names. And a little disclaimer, I mentioned Christian names. There is going to be a bit of a sort of bias in the names that we... we cover here. It's going to be names that are popular in English-speaking countries. We talk about the English language a lot, but also we're in English-speaking countries are the names we come across.

the most and it's statistically likely that you're watching this from an english-speaking country or somewhere maybe in europe where they speak a language that has names that are related to the English names we're going to talk about. We're going to start with the most common names in English. Oh, we should just mention where the word name...

comes from? It's meant name for all time. Yeah, it really has. All the Proto-Indo-European languages have a word along the lines of name, begins with a na, makes a sort of ma sound at some point, and it means name. We've talked about... names in our NIMS episode, like heteronyms and homonyms and other NIMS. We've also got nomenclature. The Proto-Undo-European root here means it is nomen, basically. Exactly. All of these things, they just mean...

name. The names that we still have today actually tell a story, don't they? They tell the story of, in English-speaking countries, the history of England and beyond. So where on earth do we start? when we want to talk about the history of first names. English given names trace their roots to like... three or four different things primarily, as far as our top 100 or so go. We have compound Germanic roots in the Anglo-Saxon era, and then we've got biblical, Latin, Greek names.

Christianization, continental influence. And then we've got creative processes of borrowing, inventing and adapting over time. Creating and adapting names has been a thing for a long time. It feels very modern thing to do, but you know.

At one point, it was creative to call your kid John. Yeah, absolutely. So Anglo-Saxon names are really interesting, aren't they? Because so many of them are... compounds. In fact, almost... Diathemic. Is that the word for it? Yeah. Two meaningful elements that join together to create signal character and status. And to immediately start talking about myself, Robert is one of those. It's a Germanic root word. It was Hrodbert or Hrodbert, various variations on it.

So there are a lot of websites that you go to and you look at what your name means and they'll tell you it means, you know, Summerflower or Mighty King or something like that. And you shouldn't believe them. I think Robert might genuinely mean... Bright and famous. It's perfect. So you've got the Hrod bit there. It's also the start of Rupert and various other names that means fame. But the Bert.

comes from an old Germanic root that meant bright and is directly related to the word bright. Now, Robert is actually a Norman take on That Germanic word, in all the sort of Germanic languages, it's Robert's and its variants begin with an H, they're a HRA sound, but we know that the French aren't great with H's at the start of words, so you don't have it in the Norman.

version of that name. But others that have got that Bert at the end of them, like Albert, Hubert, Egbert. There's not many Egberts around these days. But again, they've got, it means bright at the end of it. So Albert is noble. bright. Hubert is mind bright. And Ekbert or Egbert is actually from an old English ECG, this word pronounced edge and the word that becomes our word. edge, but it also meant in Old English a sword, so ekbut.

meant bright sword. I've always thought it's quite a goofy name, but actually it's kind of kick-ass. Yeah, I think it's very cool. Other Anglo-Saxon names, we also have roots like wolf that come up a lot, like wolfstana, which means wolfstone, who was an English Benedictine monk. Bjorn Wolf, which is Warrior Wolf, the King of Mercia. And then Elf comes up a lot too.

As in Alfred, ultimately, meaning elf council. I looked that one up because I thought, what do you mean elf council? Like it's giving advice to elves, but elf did have this other meaning in Old English that essentially meant a genius, you know, sort of supernaturally. intelligent you'll also see to your point on the end of Robert and things like that we've got the old bit

that appears in names like Harold. And then it's also the same one you get in Ronald and Gerald and Arnold, and it means to be strong. So Harold is from, it means. army commander but the the element on the end is strong and we mentioned the the red in alfred and i think in a previous episode we also mentioned that that red turns up at the end of Ethelred. That means advised, basically. It actually comes from redan, which is the Old English verb meaning...

to advise but we actually get our word read from that. There's this odd thing about English that our word for read is not like any of the other Germanic languages words for read but it's because we've taken it from this sort of idea of advice, of learning. in that sort of way of being advised by whatever it is that you read. But in ethylred, that basically means, well, the ethyl is like noble, but you can take it as meaning well advised, which is why...

As I mentioned in a previous episode, Ethelred the unready is a pun because unready means badly advised. So here's the well-advised. The badly advised. Another frequent ending you see in Anglo-Saxon names is Rick, which is also the same Rick we see in Richard. It means ruler. So Godric is God ruler. And let's see, Welfric is wolf ruler. Now, I'm wondering here if that's related to the word rich and therefore the word Reich, which people will know.

I suppose, notorious reasons from the German language, but also these words that meant sort of a domain. It is also ultimately related to all words for like moving in a straight line. So right and things like that. A fun one I noticed is in Beowulf, you have the name Hrothgar. And that's actually the old English version of just the name Roger.

Which is funny. King Roger is for some reason slightly less regal than Hrothgar. We'll get into the fact that many of the most common names in English have equivalents across. many languages. It's particularly when Christianity kicks in, that really becomes a thing across Europe that people in various different countries are calling each other by the same names, but around the Anglo-Saxon period.

the Germanic languages, the places where people are speaking Germanic languages, so Scandinavia and Northern Europe, people are similarly calling people by similar... And the major influences we have on name popularity throughout history are religion and tradition. royalty and celebrity so you name your your kid after the the most famous person around who was a ruler probably and then media and literature as we get later in history and more people start reading and then we have multiculturalism

as cultures blend, which we can get into with Norman names. And then social mobility becomes a thing as the middle class. aspires or forms and then aspires to higher levels, you get more prestige type names. And then oddly enough, statistical awareness. So we can Google.

the most popular names now. And one of the reasons we get a lot of best spelling variations on Ellison and Michaela and things like that is because people look them up and then go with an unusual spelling that speaks to them. Jackson with an X. as the CK, things like that. I was watching an American reality show the other day. Don't ask me why. And to my eyes, not a single person on it was spelling their name correctly. Not a single person.

on it i didn't know you could spell lauren basically any other way than lauren and they but no they found one they found one and to be fair it made more sense to spell it l-o-r-e-n Anyway. That leaf is Loren to me. Yeah, yeah, exactly. A thought you just spurred in my mind is, going back to the Anglo-Saxon names, that something similar is happening in Anglo-Saxon names.

as is happening in the coining of names these days. And that is naming people for the virtues that you hope they will have, or at least virtues that you respect. So Edward is, you know, prosperity guard. The ward at the end of Edward really is like, you know, toward something, to guard it. So that is essentially a description of how you'd like them to be, as are, you know, hope.

Verity. We got that a lot in the Protestant Reformation and Puritan culture in particular because like biblical moral virtue. And classical revival names were huge from the 1500s to the 1800s, Faith, Hope, Grace, and then even like classic literary names like Alexander and Hector.

You mentioned funny spellings, though. I do need to plug, there's a subreddit that's very, I don't know how funny it is. I mean, it might be punching down a little bit, but it's called Tragedy, but Tragedy is spelled T-R-A-G. E-D-E-I-G-H And it was based on like an actual name that someone gave their child allegedly on the internet. The name that your child has to live with forever. Is that the moment to get creative?

Maybe it's not. Often people go for tried and tested names, right? Which is why you end up with the same names at the top of lists every year. And actually I've been looking into what names are popular right now. We'll get there a bit later on because we're trying to work our way through history, aren't we? Lots of Aidens and Bradens and things like that in the United States, I think. Braden? Ask any middle school teacher how many Aidens they have in their class.

bradens how many jadens they have in their class the answer is more than one i was looking at most popular names in england and wales and i realized that when i looked at the list the list for 1984 and the list for 1994, I just thought, yes, those are my people. These are the people I was at school with. You know, they're all names that are really recognizable, like Jessica and Lauren and stuff like that. You know.

There were loads of those in my classes. That is one of the reasons I am a Jess, because there were always two Jessicas in every single class I have ever been in. Jesses come as pairs. Everyone knows that. My unmarried name is Ferris. In high school, my name was Ferris because there was another Jessica. Bye.

Let's jump back to the Normans real quick. We mentioned the Anglo-Saxons. So, you know, now the French have arrived. How did we change the way we named things? And a lot of it had to do with like Latin church. words, things like that. But there were also a lot of Germanic names still, right? Like William, which means Will Helmet.

Right, which comes across in the German version, Wilhelm, where helm literally means a helmet. William's one of those interesting ones where there are an awful lot of variations on it, but the surprising ones are the ones that begin with a G. Because we're not used to it. You know, we know that William the Conqueror was Guillaume in French, right? Although he was, I don't think in Norman French he was Guillaume. I think he was something more like.

Wilhelm, actually. Guillermo and stuff. These are all versions of William, which is a bit surprising, but it's actually quite a consistent thing across languages that Gs and Ws can swap places. Those sounds do swap places. And then, you know, of course, you've got the twists like Bill. It does get really messy, doesn't it? Can I tell you about a book that I found? I will tell you about it now. I just thought it was quite cool. So it's from 1920s, published.

for use by the Adjutant General's Office War Department. So this is the U.S. War Office published this. for use presumably by their personnel in various different countries. And it's called A List of Christian Names, Their Derivatives, Nicknames and Equivalents in Several Foreign Languages. What it is is just a list of An A to Z of it's entirely men's names, which is interesting. I guess they are dealing with the armed forces. And in the 1920s, that was fellas. But with each of them, it says...

what sort of British equivalent there is. And there is a few surprises in there. So Arminius and Hermann, I think it's quite surprising that those two are the same name. I mean, you think about it, okay, yeah, Hermann, Arminius, they kind of fit together, but you wouldn't immediately... Assume it. Benedict has lots of variations, including Benito, Bento and Bennett. So the surname Bennett is actually the same as the surname Benedict. So Lewis is also the same.

It's the same name, but just, you know, has been taken on in different languages, in different forms, as Ludwig, Louise, Ludovic, Luigi, but also Clovis and Clodoveo as well. These are all... versions of Lewis just in different languages. I love this sort of stuff. Also, here's a good one. We're talking about W's and G's and Wilhelm and Guillaume. Well, Walter and Gautier, as in Jean-Paul Gautier, are the same.

name. Oh, cool. Yeah, that's a good one. Robert, by the way, I looked this up to see what entries they had for that because I'm egocentric. Variations on Robert listed are Robert, Robertus, Rupert, Roberto. Should I just call you Bob for the rest of the episode? No, I'm taking on Dobbin. Please call me Dobbin.

That's actually really cute, though. I like Dobbin. It sounds like a pet name, yeah. Well, so there used to be a TV show. There's way, way, way, way, way before my time in England. It was a donkey that was, it's in black and white. It was really, really old. TV show called Dobbin the Donkey. No, I've got that wrong. It wasn't. It was called Muffin the Mule. It wasn't that. My dad had it. Do you know what it is?

My dad had a toy donkey called Dobbin the donkey. It was from around about the same time. I've just conflated the two things. That's fantastic, though. Watch a man completely lose the plot. Yeah, I don't know what muffin is. What name Muffin might be short for? Okay. Well, is it funny that my dad had a toy called Dobbin the Donkey, Robert the Donkey, and then he named his kid Robert. My childhood dog was named Jesse. oh you

Who came first? We were the same age. We were the same age. No, no, no, no, no. Someone got named Jess first. Which one? I'm not sure the neighbors had her first and named her Jessie. I don't think they named her after. me but my parents kept the name after she became our dog but for some reason i never found it confusing at all you know my mom's got a cat called alan and my sister has a husband called alan

And I find it endlessly confusing. Alan is a hilarious name for a cat, though. Yeah, it is, isn't it? Has anyone fed Alan? I'm fine. Some more from this book. Just I won't go. I won't overdo it. But Geordie and George are the same name. You might not know as are Jorge and Jörg. And Georg, they're all the same name. Francis, Franco, Frank, Franz and Francois are the same names. I think people know that Francis and Francois are the same, but Frank and Franz, maybe not.

And I'll do one last one, which is... Oh, yeah. Does everyone know that Stephen Esteban and Etienne, the French name Etienne, are all the same name? They are. I didn't know Etienne. That's cool.

Yeah, that's a good one, isn't it? Should we, at this point, talk about the fact that biblical names are widely distributed across cultures? We 100%. Should some of the most popular names, all of the most popular names as far as the top like 50 from the past 100 years. And I'm pulling this from the US Social Security Administration's records from the past 100 years. These are American names, but this is also likely to.

be very true where you are as well well where you were not in Germany no no quite although there will be variations on them here in Germany as well they're biblical names James which is also the same name as Jacob, Iago, Diego, Santiago, Tiago, Yakimo, Hamish, Seamus, Jaime. Yakov and Yakub. I have a special note on Seamus and Hamish, if I may, because it was one of those moments where I went, oh, that is fantastic, that Seamus and Hamish are the same name. So they're both...

Celtic, as in Gaelic Celtic, so Irish or Scottish Gaelic. And the reason that you can have one that starts with a sh sound and one that starts with a h sound is a characteristic of... Gaelic languages, which is something called consonant mutation. And the difference between Seamus and Hamish is that, okay, bear with me here, Hamish is in the vocative case. Now, the vocative case is...

Basically, the one you use to refer to a person, to themselves. It often gets written as, like, poetically, oh... So if I want to say, oh, Jess, how nice it is to see you, that would be the vocative use of Jess. In English, we do not have a vocative form, so I just call you Jess. But in Gaelic languages...

The way I would refer to you if I was referring straight to you, to your face, rather than to someone else about you, would be different. And in this case, referring to Seamus to their face is a name that is much more like Hamish. There you go. Rubbish. rubbish I don't like what it sounds like there you go but for example so in Welsh Welsh does this as well and you've got the name Mary in Welsh or a Welsh equivalent of it but

I like to show off, I can pronounce but the start of that, that means the church of Mary. What you've had is you've had a mutation from the M. to a v because in this case it's not the vocative case but it's another case that initiates that in james and john the j is from the hebrew y that then went into latin as an i

And then came back around to a J. Exactly. And you get this with a lot of the Hebrew names. John is a good one. Yohanan is pronounced something like that in Hebrew. But John is also Jan, Jean, Johannes. Johan, Giovanni, Ivan, I think that's an interesting one, Ewan and Ian. They're all just variations of John in different European languages, ultimately. Also Hans. No way, really. Yeah, yeah.

the clipped johan oh yeah so that's johannes yeah becomes hans yeah that makes sense and i think uh johannan is thought to mean god is gracious yeah i didn't mention james means supplanter Or one who takes by the heel. Yeah. And that's a reference to the fact that he was supposedly in the Bible born holding his twin brother Esau's ankle. Right. That makes sense. You mentioned a woman's.

name, which is Mary, comes from a Hebrew word, which is Miriam in Hebrew. So the names Miriam and Mary are actually, ultimately, etymologically speaking, they are the same name as obviously Marie and Maria. and Maya as well. I don't think anyone knows what it actually means. I think there's a theory that it means rebellion, but I think it's with names. It is really hard. You have to take basically every one of them with a pinch of salt as to watch it.

it actually means because beloved is another theory for that one or a child who's wished for someone with that name becomes really famous and really important to for example a religious set and people decide that that name needs to mean something really

really grand or something that reflects that particular individual um which obviously doesn't make any sense does it unless they were the first person to be called that why would it mean something that relates to what supposedly happened in their life The top woman's name from the past hundred years is Mary predictably, but.

There's a lot more variation after that in women's names than men's names, which all seem to come from like the top 100 are primarily from biblical figures or royalty from the past centuries. Whereas the number, the number two. A woman's name from the past hundred years was Patricia. Oh, really? Which is a feminine form of Patrick. A lot of these are feminized forms of masculine names and translated through.

various languages so patricia is from the latin patricius meaning noble or of the patrician class so it's even got like the word father in it now that seems so obvious now that the Pat at the start of Patricia is the same as at the start of patriarchy. Jennifer is cool, though. It's the Cornish form of Guinevere. Really? I just am amazed that there is a name that is in that wide use that comes from Cornish.

a language that has not been spoken by very many people for a very long time it was revived in particular in the like 70s it wasn't As well known, likely because of its connection to the story. But it means like white, fair or blessed plus phantom or spirit, but probably not the scary spirit. You know that big bargain detergent jug is 80% water, right? It doesn't clean as well. 80% water? I thought I was getting a better deal because it's so big.

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first attested in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare's play. She's Shylock's daughter, so it is a variation on a Hebrew word. And he did this a couple times, especially with women's names. Miranda and Cordelia were also... not particularly popular before he used them. With Miranda, it's a feminine name of Latin origin that means worthy of admiration. Although it existed as a surname before, it wasn't...

typically a woman's first name until after the character in The Tempest became popular. And then Cordelia, it's popularly associated with the Latin word for heart. But it's also been linked to the Welsh name Cri the Lad, which means Jewel of the Sea, or it could be from French Coeur de Lyon.

Heart of a Lion. Oh, yeah. But also not popular until after Shakespeare got a hold of it. Wendy was virtually unknown until J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan. Yeah, I've even heard people say that it was invented for that book. I don't think it was, right? Maybe it was, but it was basically unheard of before. And then it became one of the top names in Britain by the 1930s. You know, I noticed something while I was looking through the stats for the most common girls' names for babies.

boys' names for babies. I look back for the last decade for England and Wales, and what I thought was very interesting was that suddenly from nowhere in 2023, the name Freya appears in the top five. most common baby names for girls in England and Wales. That has to be to do with some sort of television series or something, right? Just from nowhere, this Norse god pops up.

I would expect that to be true. The name Florence, the woman's name Florence, didn't become popular as a woman's name until after Florence Nightingale. And she was named because she was born in Florence. Wow. Well, the lady of the lamp plied her. trade in Derbyshire. So we're very proud of her there. Our hospital is named after her. But my wife, who is French, always thinks it's very strange when she comes across a woman called...

Florence is a man's name. Oh, interesting. That is neat. And that has happened a lot with women's names is men's surnames and first names have become women's names like Ashley and Lori. and things like that. And then there are still names that can go either way, aren't there? Like Leslie. You can have a Leslie that goes. Kim. Yeah. Hillary as well. There's a gag in Community, I think, where a character called Kim.

is writing notes to one of the main male characters and ultimately is revealed to be a man. And he says, there are more people in the world named Kim who are men than women. Yeah, that's true. I've known more Kims that are men than... women but all the Kims that were women were Kimberleys right whereas the men were Kims as far as I know and so if you start shortening names then you are going to get that happening a lot more

commonly right like you get suddenly you get a load of charlies that are also right women you know because they were charlotte's charlotte kimberly by the way began as a surname that was derived from a few different place names. Yeah. I mean, I do know loads of places called Kimberley. It means like Royal Fortress or something to that effect. Yeah. I mean, we're not going to do surnames now, but if your surname matches with a place, it means at some point, someone.

in your family was from that place you know at some point or affiliated with a clan from that place as well they might have taken their name from someone else we were talking about variations on names that end up

being kind of surprising. And one of my favorites is all of the variations on Margaret, because you get everything from Marjorie to Maggie to Peggy to Daisy.

And Daisy being a nickname because Marguerite in French is the name of the Oxeye Daisy. That's just so elegant, isn't it? That came up in our flower episode. And then Pearl is also a nickname for Margaret because it means pearl. Oh, that's sweet. I was... thinking about the name bear the other day was it you that i was talking to you talking to about this someone points i say isn't it interesting how the name bear has caught on because it matches with well

So, okay, bear with me. I mean, I have met people called bear, which is not a thing that I had before. Bear. Bear. There's a very famous one called Bear Grylls. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But also I've come across people called Bear. And I thought, oh, this is a name that's catching on. Not realizing that actually a lot of people who get referred to as Bear are actually just called Edward.

because of teddy bears. Oh my God, that's amazing. Yeah. And I was trying to draw this amazing link to the fact that, you know, like the Russian means. bear as well and that's a name and Bjorn that means bear we're just sort of you know joining up with a fashion that has been present in Europe for a long time but now I think it's just like a

a cheeky reference to fluffy toys. That's really cute actually. But I quite like the name bear. Yeah, I think it's cute. Can I talk a little bit more about my research into England and Wales popular names? I just want to ask you what you would guess.

the most popular baby name for a girl was in 2024. In the US or? In England and Wales. I'll tell you it's England and Wales just because the Office for National Statistics in the UK covers England and Wales. Scotland has its own. business going on. Northern Ireland has its own business going on. I feel dramatically as a 35 year old.

childless person i feel dramatically out of touch with how people are naming their children and i am always surprised to find out so i don't know i would go with like elizabeth or something but i'm probably super wrong Very sweet. Yes, of course. We're all naming our babies after our late queen. No, it's actually the same as it was in America. It's Olivia. Second, though, in England and Wales was Amelia. And let me tell you that that has been the case.

Olivia, number one. Amelia, number two. Since 2016, the same two names have come first and second. Do you know what happened in 2015? Amelia came top and Olivia came second. So there you go. Other popular names have been Lily, Isla, Ava. But if we look at boys, something arguably more interesting is going on. So what do you think? I don't know. You have no chance to know. Was the most common... Actually, you know, there is a logic to it.

Maybe you will. What was the most common name given to baby boys born in 2024 in England and Wales? Oliver. Oh, aha. Very, very good. For many years, it was that, but Oliver was actually knocked off. the top spot two years ago by this name. Am I? Isn't that depressing? We were calling our girls Olivia and our boys Oliver. What's the creativity, guys? The country of the Beatles. Come on, show us some creativity. I'll tell you what number one was. It was...

Muhammad. Oh, yeah, that makes sense. It does make sense because a lot of Muslim boys get named Muhammad. But that is specifically the spelling M-U-H-A-M-M-A-D. Also on the list in the top... 100 were the names Mohamed spelt M-O-H-A-M-M-E-D and Mohamed spelt M-O-H-A-M-M-A. And if you add those three spellings of what is ostensibly the same name together, then you have more than twice the number of people being given the name Mohammed when they're born, as you do...

the name that comes second, which these days is Noah, actually. Oliver is in third. And basically, if you do add all of the different various spellings of Muhammad together, Oliver hasn't been top for the last few years. It hasn't. Mohammed has been there. What's going on with the name Mohammed is that you have these three different transliterations into English of the same name. And what I thought was interesting as I was researching this is that Mohammed, so the one that is...

up the top where you have M-U-H-A-M-M-A-D. That is the more modern transliteration of Muhammad. So M-O-H-A-M-M-E-D, which I think you see more commonly in sort of literal senses, that's actually an older transliteration of that obviously very important name to the Muslim faith. Yeah, asking when you are in Morocco, for example, learning someone's name, first name, is not super helpful because then you cannot...

determine who you're talking about because that's everybody's name. Yeah. There's a similar thing going on with Sikhism as well, because sometimes a Sikh man will tell you that their surname is Singh when actually... That's actually just a name that Sikh men take on when they become a member of the Sikh brotherhood, just as Sikh women take on Kaur, K-A-U-R. And it's not that we can judge too much because...

100 years ago, you couldn't throw a brick without hitting a John or a James or other religious names that recur frequently throughout our various traditions. Do you know the most common name given to baby boys in the U.S. last year, by the way? I was going to guess Oliver again, but... Not bad. Came third. Number one, I'm not sure you'd get this because I think it's a bit left field, but it's Liam. Oh, I believe that. And I mean, is that...

kid named William or is that kid named Liam? I think the statistics are based on what's written on their birth certificate. So I think it is. So they're just going straight with Liam. And you've got to bear in mind that this is a thing that happens there, isn't it? Like Jack, right? Jack is a nickname. Yeah. For a John, I believe, but now is a name in its own right. And then at number two, you've got Noah.

female girls, female girls, baby girls born in the States last year. The top three were Olivia, Emma and Amelia. So actually very similar to the British setup. And while I was reading around this, I found an interesting bit of analysis from a woman called Claire Green, who is an expert from the baby naming website Nameberry. But she pointed out that we tend to use names...

which are just old enough to not be a grandparent's name, right? So if we tend to go a generation up, so maybe the name of our grandparents, they call it the 100-year rule in baby naming. circles. And so she predicted, in England anyway, I don't know about in the States, maybe, but we're going to start to see a resurgence of names like Susan and Roger in the next generation.

Which I think is interesting because it's hard to imagine a baby being called Roger these days. I knew a decent amount of Susans as a kid, but I would be surprised to meet a... Betsy, for example, which this is a good point. We've been doing this sort of shortened variations on names for a while. Betsy and Betty are Elizabeth, but in the past 100 years in the United States, there were more Bettys. with Betty on their birth certificate than Elizabeth's. You know, my grandma was called Betty.

And my entire life, I only found out after she died that her name was Betty. Just Betty. You call someone Betty. You go through the rigmarole of writing Elizabeth and then you immediately call them Betty. That's how you're supposed to do it.

The reason they were popular, though the name Betty was so popular, is Betty Grable, Betty Boop, and Betty White, you know? Of course, of course. And this is why we're going to have a load of Margos, you know, starting school in... five years time as well by the way betty white i learned recently was born

before Martin Luther King Jr. I mean, to be fair to Martin Luther King Jr., his life was somewhat cut short. Yes, but you think of him as being a person from a different era because she lived so long. Speaking of which, we should talk about Martin, who is our... our third partner on this show and isn't here, but we need to talk about his name. His name is the same as Marcus, by the way. Oh, neat. Yeah, and it references the Greek god Mars. It is what is known as a theophoric.

name, so a name that's got a god in it. And Marcus and Martin, they both mean Mars-like, so like the Roman god of war. But other good ones are like, so Heracles is... theophoric because it has hera at the start of it as in hera so it's got a reference to a god in it and isadora the name isadora means a gift of Isis. Isis. Yeah, the Egyptian god. Theophoric names. And actually, so, you know the name Beowulf. We talked about it as being bee.

A kenning, yeah. Though I have heard recently that there are some people who contest that and blame Tolkien. I think there are more than some people. I think there are a lot of very important people who know what they're talking about to contest it. And I think, like... increasingly the sort of dominant theory now is that that is a theophoric name and that the Beo at the start is a reference to some Germanic god. I think it's B-E-O-W, which makes it a little bit...

more sense in that you might be more likely to name your kid after a god than an insect. But at the same time, I do really like the idea of the bee wolf. Fluffy, buzzy wolf. Most people blame Tolkien for that because he was seeking folklore and legend in old english contexts uh and so he has a famous translation of beowulf as well so and and was it's only fairly recently recently published the yeah the tolkien version and i i think scholars think it's

not necessarily that good because he was in his early 30s when he did the translation. However, it's accompanied by notes that he wrote much later and those notes correct himself a lot of the time and are thought to be like, you know. pretty near the pinnacle of analysis of old English. Anyway, we've digressed. Yes, we have. Who knew that there was so much Beowulf controversy? One more theophoric one, though, one more that includes the name of a god.

you know, I don't think leaps out at you, is Nicholas. You know, the Nick at the start of Nicholas is the same as in the name Nike, as in the brand, yeah? And Nike, the Greek god of... Victory. So Nicholas, yes, is a reference to victorious-ness. It means, give me a second, victory people. Oh, neat. And we have a lot of these names popularized by saints too. One of the cooler ones popularized by a saint is Barbara, which is the same as the word barbarian, basically, which in...

It's from the Greek meaning foreign person or foreign woman is what Barbara means, which we've discussed sort of imitates the speech of a foreigner as a barbarian, as someone who says blah, blah, blah, or bar, bar, bar. But it was popularized through St. Barbara, a third century Christian martyr whose legend became famous across medieval Europe. By the way.

Barbara is the name of my aunt, who is our biggest fan, and she's lovely. Hi, auntie. Oh, hey, Auntie Barbara. I had an Auntie Barbara as well. Although it was one of these things where she wasn't... actually my auntie we just called every everyone's like everyone yeah well our friends parents were called aunties and uncles i don't know if that's a thing

Oh, absolutely. Definitely was for growing up for me. I made this joke the other day at a Greek function. My spouse is Greek. And whenever I go to a Greek family function, there are many people there. And it takes a while to figure out who's actually related.

Because there are many. Actually, I thought I was related to my Auntie Jane for a long time, but turns out not. Another Greek one, by the way. And again, you associate, obviously, Alexander the Great with... with greece and alexander means defending of men right defender of men or defending men and the ander at the end of there i mean it's obvious once you realize it is the same as andros as in

man, right? When we talk about being androgynous, we're talking about being sort of man and having sort of male and female traits and stuff. What are the words you've got andros in there? Andrew. Andrew. That's my spouse's name. There we go. I thought that was interesting. When you realize that a name comes from Greek, you can start to pull it apart. But until someone's pointed out that it does, then you're a bit lost.

Name that has transferred from a saint in particular tends to be Greekified to some extent, like Christopher, Christophoros, Christbearer. Yeah. And then it'll pass through Latin as well, which will obscure it. little bit more as well, which is why it can be a little bit hard to trace them back and why you end up with all these different variations across cultures that live. on each other's doorsteps. Paul is another good one. It's the same as Paolo and Pablo and Powell and Pal and Pavel.

But ultimately from St. Paul the Apostle who was Saul or Saulus of Tarsus. Paul was Saul. Yeah, that's the whole, that's the whole. biblical story just the whole thing yeah he changes his he changes his name is like a whole that's his whole shtick he like he changes his name just by changing the first letter he represents The transition from Saul being an asshole to Paul being not an asshole. I see. It's a biblical story. I get it.

Oh, it looks like the Latin adjective. That's like Mario and Wario, isn't it? It is, it is. If you change the first letter, they go from evil to not evil. Oh, so there is a reason behind this. Paul... is from the Latin paulus, well, sort of. English version of it is, but it means small or humble. So he is metaphorically humbling himself before the Lord and whatnot. I've shown my ignorance with the Bible there, and I apologize. Oh, no, we're good.

I think I was overexposed to such things as a kid. And Peter famously stone. So there's some kind of, I don't know, cool stories to be found in that as well. Well, Pesca, have we taken first names? That's your evil. Twin, Jessica. I think we're done with four names. We'll begin to prepare ourselves to do surnames at a later date. I could make this joke about Bob, but that's already an option. It is, it is, yeah. Yeah, Bob, Rob.

Pot and Dobbin. Well, Gob. Let's do this. I don't like that. It's pronounced Jobe. I love that show. That's great. We'll catch you next time. Join us again on Words Unraveled.