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 name is found in early 11th C Austria, in a list of witnesses to a charter, and is of uncertain gender (but, given that it’s in a list of witnesses to a charter, is probably masculine).

Today’s name is a weird little Low German name found in Estonia in the 14th C. By context it’s masculine, but other than that, we have don’t really have any clue — not even a gut feeling or a hunch. It doesn’t resemble anything we’ve see before!

Today’s name is a rather-modern sounding late 16th C Swedish name — or, at least, a name found in Sweden. Between 1591 and 1597, in a list of innkeepers from Stockholm, the same man shows up named Quant, Quante, and Qwant. While it’s reasonable to assume that most of Stockholm’s innkeepers were Swedish, there are other names in the list that show distinctly non-Swedish (generally more German) influences, so it’s entirely possible that Mr. Quant is not Swedish himself.

Today’s name is one of those names, found in Austria at the turn of the 12th C. We have no other name like it, and may very well find no other name like it, and we don’t even know where to begin with it’s etymology — other than the fact that it’s almost certainly Germanic, given the context it’s found in.

Today’s mystery comes from 13th C Germany, and is very strange:

Any Swedish experts in the house? We’ve got a name for you!

Today’s name is a super exciting mystery, because we came across our first instance of it only a week or two ago, and since then we’ve found numerous other examples, all in the same immediate context. The name is Jeys or Jeyes, and it appears a number of times in the marriage and baptismal registers of Stratford-upon-Avon, in Warwickshire.

So obscure, it doesn’t look or sound like anything else that we have in our data

Today’s name is found in late 13th C Italy (Bergamo, to be precise), and we have two instances of it, each in a different spelling.

when we find a name which is (a) from Protestant contexts, (b) unusual/unidentifiable, and (c) not Biblical, we often find ourselves a bit at a loss!

Today’s name is a masculine one that shows up in a Cornish parish in 1562, 1577, and 1593. (All marriage records, so it’s unlikely to be the same person, but the third could be the son of the first.)

Today’s name is one of those names that is just a little bit unsettling: The names which you plug into google and get no hits. Is it a typo? Is it a scribal error? Is it a transcription error? Is it an actual name, just so rare that there’s no trace of it on the internet?! Whatever it is, we’re looking to you to help us figure it out.

Today’s name is an odd one found in 11th C Belgium. The only instance we can find of this name on the internet is the single instance in the Dictionary, a witness to a charter. It could be an editorial error, or a scribal error, but if it is, it’s not clear what it is an error for.

Today’s name is a masculine name found in Latin records from early 13th-century Germany. It isn’t obviously dithematic in nature, nor does it bear any resemblance to any other name we’ve come across so far. So it is a true mystery:

Today’s name is from 12th C France, and was one that, before we wrote this post, was utterly opaque to us: