Name News

Every Monday we will post an entry that hasn't yet been published with a view towards harnessing the collective onomastic power of the internet. If you have any thoughts about the name's origin, other variants it might be related to, other examples of its use, etc., please share them in the comments! If you wish…

Today’s bizarre mystery name is the last of our Q-name mysteries! It’s a masculine name found in 9th C Spain, and, well…take a look at it.

Today’s mystery name is a lovely Italian feminine name:

Today we’ve got two entries which we’re pretty sure are ultimately one entry. It’s a masculine name with examples found in Poland and the Czech Republic, in Latin and in Middle High German.

Both names are masculine names found in 16th-century Finland, in Swedish-language records.

Today’s name is Italian, from late 14th century Genoa.

Many of the records that we have from medieval Ireland were not written by native Gaelic speakers, but rather by Anglo-Norman scribes trained in Latin, which means that sometimes their manglings of Irish names are…interesting.

Here’s a poser! By the 13th century, there aren’t that many names of Germanic origin where the root themes are obscure. And yet, this appears to be what we have here.

Today’s name is a lovely late 13th/early 14th C Italian feminine name.

Today’s name is from early 16th C Italy:

Ready for another baby name mystery? I present to you Elwanda, which saw a sharp increase in usage in 1921: 1923: 54 baby girls named Elwanda61% in 4 states: 14 TX, 7 WV, 6 AR, 6 KY1922: 85 baby gi…

Doesn’t Wexbert sound like it’s someone’s idea of what a medieval name is, rather than being an actual medieval name?

Today’s name is so mysterious, we don’t even know (a) whether it is in fact a name or (b) if it is, what gender it is.

Today’s name looks like it should be easily identifiable as a classical name revived in Renaissance Italy — it has the look of a Latinized name of probably Greek origin (so many Phs…). But if that’s true, we haven’t been able to determine what the root Greek name is!

Every Monday we will post an entry that hasn't yet been published with a view towards harnessing the collective onomastic power of the internet. If you have any thoughts about the name's origin, other variants it might be related to, other examples of its use, etc., please share them in the comments! If you wish…

Every Monday we will post an entry that hasn't yet been published with a view towards harnessing the collective onomastic power of the internet. If you have any thoughts about the name's origin, other variants it might be related to, other examples of its use, etc., please share them in the comments! If you wish…

The registers of the Walloon church in Canterbury in the second half of the sixteenth century are full of wonderful names

Today’s name is a mouthful of an early Italian feminine name:

12th-century France is full of lovely, unusual feminine names, and one of them is today’s Mystery Monday name.

We seem to be following an Italian trend lately! But this name is only Italian obliquely. One source we’ve been working through (we mentioned it before, in a Mystery Monday post on Uliana) is notarial records from mid-14th century Florence, which records the names of many enslaved men, women, and children, most of “Tartar” origin.

While many Italian names come in masculine/feminine pairs, which provides a great springboard for research, we don’t know of any masculine Italian name Adomo — it’s tempting to connect the name to Adam, but the vowel shift is otherwise unwitnessed. So we’re looking for clues to help resolve two names: The actual Adoma and the potential Adomo. Have you found either of these before? Do you have any thoughts about their origins? Please share in the comments!

Today we’re looking at a pair of names, because given where they are both found, and the similarity in their sound/spelling, we’re wondering if they aren’t perhaps related.

But we’d love to see any concrete evidence that others have connecting forms like Yeneke directly back to the root name John. If you’ve got any, please share in the comments!