Name News

These are ten names given to girls which I saw only once in the birth announcements of last year. They are not all rare (and some of them are popular in other countries even if uncommon here), but they are at least names you don't see every day. Aviva Feminine form of the modern Hebrew…

Words meaning ‘yellow’ do not appear to be especially productive in terms of contributing to the development of names. And if you think about it, why should it be — when there are words meaning ‘gold’ instead!

(Well, onomastically and linguistically, that’s a very bad argument: We do not know the thought process driving the use of color terms in names, whether in dithematic Germanic constructions or derivatives of Latin and Greek color terms, and so drawing conclusions of this sort is not well-grounded. But it makes for a nice story about why we’re looking at words relating to ‘gold’ instead of words relating to ‘yellow’.)