False Name Meanings: How Folk Etymology and Copy-Paste Websites Create Myths

Picture a couple on the sofa with three tabs open, all about the name Imogen. One site says it means “maiden.” Another says “innocent.” A third, an old scholarly article, argues for “last-born.” Nobody in that room is being careless, and still they’re about to put one of those words on a birth announcement as if it were settled. This page explains where false name meanings come from, using cases where the paper trail is actually documented, and shows you how to tell a real etymology from a copied guess before you repeat it.

• About 30 min read
• Updated October 2026
• Data: SSA top-5 history · named etymological references

1What actually makes false name meanings false?

Here’s the direct answer. A name meaning is false when it’s presented as the established source of the name and the evidence doesn’t support it. That covers outright inventions, but far more often it covers something subtler: a disputed theory stated as fact, a later association passed off as the original sense, or a dictionary’s careful “possibly” quietly upgraded to “means.”

So the useful question is rarely “true or false?” It’s “how strong is the evidence, and has anyone been honest about its strength?” A good reference can tell you a name’s origin is unknown. A bad one almost never will. For the bigger research method this sits inside, start with our guide to researching name origins without repeating myths; this page zooms in on how the myths themselves get manufactured.

What people often assume about name meanings

Most of us come to name meanings with a few quiet assumptions. They feel like common sense, which is exactly why they’re worth looking at one at a time. None of them is foolish. Each one is just a little stronger than the evidence usually allows.

“Every name has one meaning, and someone knows it”

The baby-name-book format trains this expectation: name, dash, two-word meaning. It’s tidy, and for some names it’s close to fair. But the format has no room for “unknown,” “disputed” or “invented by a novelist in 1849,” so those answers get squeezed into the same two words as everything else.

Consider Mary, one of the most-studied names in the Western tradition. Behind the Name says plainly that “the meaning is not known for certain” and lists competing theories, including “sea of bitterness,” “rebelliousness” and “wished for child,” before suggesting an Egyptian origin. The 1912 Catholic Encyclopedia entry on the name reports that one scholarly monograph discussed about seventy proposed meanings. If a name that heavily studied has no single agreed sense, a confident one-liner about a rarer name deserves at least a raised eyebrow.

“If lots of sites agree, it must be right”

This is the assumption that copy-paste publishing exploits, and it keeps more false name meanings alive than any other. Agreement only counts as confirmation when the sources found the answer separately. If ten pages repeat one unsourced sentence, you have one claim, printed ten times.

A practical next step: when you see the same phrasing across several sites, treat that as a warning, not a reassurance. Independent researchers paraphrase. Copiers don’t. Our sibling piece on checking a meaning against several sources walks through the cross-checking routine in detail; the short form is to ask what each page is built on, not just what it says.

What careful sources actually show

Once you start reading scholarly or semi-scholarly references side by side, a pattern appears. They hedge more, date more and disagree more than the popular sites do. That isn’t weakness. It’s the evidence showing through.

Good references are full of qualifiers

Look at how the Online Etymology Dictionary handles Pamela. It credits Philip Sidney with inventing the name in Arcadia, published in the 1590s, says it is “presumed” to come from Greek pan- “all,” and calls the popular “all-sweetness” meaning “conjecture.” Behind the Name agrees on Sidney and says only that he “possibly intended it to mean ‘all sweetness.'”

Two references, two hedges. Now imagine that sentence passing through a few listicles. “Presumed” and “possibly” are the first words to go, because they look like clutter. What survives is “Pamela means all sweetness,” a cleaner sentence and a weaker truth.

False, disputed and simplified are different problems

It helps to sort a shaky meaning into one of three bins before deciding what to do with it. A false meaning contradicts the evidence, like an invented gloss for a name with a documented origin. A disputed meaning is one live theory among several, like any single gloss for Mary. A simplified meaning is roughly right but has lost its context, like saying Shirley “means bright clearing” without mentioning it was an English place-name and surname long before it was a girl’s name.

Each bin calls for a different fix. False meanings should be dropped. Disputed ones should be presented as a range. Simplified ones mostly need their missing sentence put back. Our explainer on etymology versus association versus modern interpretation goes deeper on why these layers get blended.

2Six ways false name meanings get made

False name meanings don’t come from one villain. They come from a handful of ordinary habits: people making sense of strange words, authors inventing characters, readers preferring the nicer story, and writers copying each other under deadline. We’ve grouped the six mechanisms that show up again and again into three families, each with at least one case where the paper trail is solid enough to follow.

One honest caveat first. The cases below were chosen because they’re well documented, not because they’re typical. Most name myths leave no trail at all, which is precisely the problem.

Myths that grow inside the language

The first two mechanisms need no website and no typo. They’re what human beings do with words they don’t fully understand, and they were shaping name meanings for centuries before anyone built a name database.

1. Folk etymology: hearing familiar words in an unfamiliar name

Folk etymology reshapes or reinterprets a word so it seems to contain words people already know. The standard overview traces the term to the German Volksetymologie, coined by Ernst Förstemann in 1852, and gives ordinary-vocabulary examples. Old English brydguma, “bride-man,” was reanalyzed with groom once the old word for “man” faded. Dialect speakers turned asparagus into “sparrowgrass.”

Names get the same treatment, usually in the meaning rather than the spelling. Mary is the classic case. Its Hebrew source, Miryam, has been linked by early writers to a root for “bitter” and another for “rebellious.” The Wikipedia article on the given name presents those as early folk etymologies and favors a possible Egyptian origin connected with “love; beloved,” while hedging with “may have” and “likely.” The Online Etymology Dictionary calls Miryam “a word of unknown origin, said to mean literally ‘rebellion.'”

Notice what “said to mean” is doing there. It reports a tradition without endorsing it. A meaning site that prints “Mary: bitter” has kept the tradition and thrown away the report.

2. The prettiest gloss wins

When a name has several proposed origins, popular sources rarely pick at random. They pick the one that sounds best on a nursery wall. Nobody needs to lie for this to happen; each copier just prefers the more appealing of the options in front of them, and over time the appealing option becomes the only one anyone sees.

Imogen shows the menu clearly. Behind the Name traces it to Innogen and says that name is “probably derived from Gaelic inghean meaning ‘maiden.'” The Wikipedia article on the given name lists proposed meanings including “maiden,” “daughter,” “innocent” and “beloved child.” And in 1976 the onomastics journal Names published an article by Richard Coates rejecting the Celtic-plus-misprint story and arguing for a Latin-based reading he calls “an ambiguous name,” somewhere between “last-born” and “lowest-born.”

Coates’s reading is not the standard explanation, and we’re not endorsing it. The point is what happens downstream. “Innocent” and “maiden” are easy to print on a keepsake. “Possibly lowest-born, depending on which scholar you follow” is not. So the gentle options travel and the awkward one quietly disappears, which tells you about marketing, not about Old Irish or Latin.

Myths that start with an author

A surprising number of familiar English given names were coined, revived or popularized by writers. That history is often more interesting than any one-word meaning. Yet popular sources keep trying to give these names ancient roots or tidy glosses, because “a novelist made it up” sounds less impressive on a meaning card.

3. A coined name gets a back-story meaning

Wendy is the textbook case, and it’s messier than the textbook. The Online Etymology Dictionary calls it a name “apparently coined by James M. Barrie,” citing Peter and Wendy (1911). Behind the Name repeats the story that the character’s name grew from the nickname “fwendy,” a child’s pronunciation of “friendy,” but adds that the name “was used prior to the play (rarely)” and may relate to the Welsh gwen element. The Wikipedia article on the name credits the “fwendy” story to Margaret Henley, daughter of Barrie’s friend W. E. Henley, and cites evidence of Wendy as a British surname from at least the 17th century.

So two popular claims are both too strong. “Wendy means friend” turns an anecdote about a nickname into an etymology. “Barrie invented Wendy” ignores the earlier, rare uses that two of the three references mention. What the evidence supports is narrower and more useful: Barrie’s work made the name common, and the “fwendy” story explains the character’s name, not some deeper sense of the word.

Vanessa follows a similar pattern with a different twist. Both Etymonline and Behind the Name credit Jonathan Swift, who built it from pieces of Esther Vanhomrigh’s name; the Wikipedia biography of Vanhomrigh specifies “Van” from the surname plus “Esse,” a pet form of Esther. Etymonline adds that Vanessa became a butterfly genus name in 1808. The butterfly is a later association, real and charming, but it is not where the name came from. A meaning card that reads “Vanessa: butterfly” has the history running backward.

4. Place-name and surname literalism

Many given names began as surnames, and many surnames began as place-names. Each stage has its own meaning, and only the oldest is usually printed. That leads to a quieter kind of false meaning: a gloss that is etymologically correct for the place but has little to do with why anyone uses the name.

Shirley is a well-documented case. Behind the Name traces it to an English surname from a place-name meaning “bright clearing.” The Wikipedia article on the name gives the Old English elements as either scire “shire” or scīr “bright, clear,” plus lēah, a wood or clearing. That’s already a split: “bright clearing” picks one of two candidate first elements.

Both references point to Charlotte Brontë’s 1849 novel Shirley, whose heroine carries the name, and Wikipedia says the novel established it as a female given name. Both also credit the child star Shirley Temple with boosting it in the 1930s. The Social Security Administration’s top-five history confirms that in the U.S., Shirley was the No. 2 name for girls in 1935 and 1936, ranked by Social Security card applications. Parents in 1935 weren’t thinking about medieval clearings. The literal place-name gloss is true; presenting it as what the name “means” to its bearers is a category error.

Myths that start in copying

The last two mechanisms are about transmission. A meaning can be perfectly sound at its source and still arrive broken, either because a copy introduced an error or because sources began citing each other in a loop. These are the mechanisms that copy-paste websites have industrialized, but both are far older than the web.

5. A scribe or printer slips, and the slip becomes a meaning

One of the most famous name meanings in Christian tradition seems to rest on a single letter. The Latin title stella maris, “star of the sea,” has long been linked to the name Mary. According to the Wikipedia article on Our Lady, Star of the Sea, Jerome’s original interpretation was probably stilla maris, “drop of the sea,” and a later copyist apparently wrote stella. The Catholic Encyclopedia entry points the same way from a different angle: it notes that Jerome rendered the Hebrew mar as stilla (“drop”) elsewhere, and that a late-ninth-century Bamberg manuscript reads stilla maris.

That doesn’t make “star of the sea” a worthless tradition. It became a beloved devotional title with centuries of meaning of its own. It does make it a poor answer to the question “what does the name Mary literally mean?”

Imogen may be the printer’s version of the same story. The Wikipedia article on Innogen traces the older name to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century history, notes that Simon Forman’s 1611 account of Cymbeline spells the heroine “Innogen,” and says the modern “Imogen” probably comes from a misspelling in the 1623 First Folio. Uckelman’s 2019 article accepts that the typo explanation is the “current standard” one, then complicates it with a disputed 1256 German charter naming an “Imogenis.” So even the myth-busting story has a footnote, which is a healthy thing for a reader to know.

6. The source that quotes itself

The sixth mechanism is the one that makes copy-paste meanings so durable. In circular reporting, information appears to come from several independent sources but actually comes from one. The cartoonist Randall Munroe named the Wikipedia version “citogenesis” in xkcd #978 in 2011: someone adds an unsourced claim, a writer repeats it, and an editor then cites that writer as the source.

The cleanest real example involves a person’s name rather than a name meaning. In February 2009, as Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg was named Germany’s economy minister, an anonymous user added an invented extra first name, “Wilhelm,” to his Wikipedia entry. In a guest post on BILDblog, the person who made the edit described how outlets including Bild and Spiegel Online repeated it within about a day, and how the Spiegel report was then used as the citation that restored the name on Wikipedia after skeptical editors removed it.

Plenty of false name meanings run the same loop at a slower, quieter pace. A plausible gloss appears on one page, gets scraped or paraphrased by others, and eventually turns up somewhere that looks authoritative enough to cite. No one in the chain has to be dishonest. Each one only has to trust the last.

3Dates, languages and datasets quietly change the answer

Even when you’re reading good sources, the answer to “what does this name mean?” can wobble depending on which period you’re asking about, which language the name is passing through, and which kind of evidence you’re looking at. These confounders don’t make research hopeless. They just explain why two honest references can print different things, and why false name meanings can hide inside perfectly real facts.

Period, language and spelling change what the claim is about

A meaning claim always has an unstated “when” and “in which language” attached to it. Once you add those back, a lot of apparent contradictions turn into differences of scope. Others turn out to be genuine disagreement, and it’s worth knowing which is which.

References disagree on dates, and that is normal

Look at Vanessa again. Etymonline says Swift coined it around 1711 as a private pseudonym and used it in the 1713 poem Cadenus and Vanessa. Behind the Name describes the same poem as dating from 1726. Pamela shows the same kind of gap: Behind the Name dates Richardson’s novel to 1740, Etymonline to 1741, and Wikipedia’s article on the name splits the difference with “1740–41.”

Gaps like these often reflect the difference between when something was written, printed or dated on its title page. The references we checked don’t say which applies here, so we won’t guess. The practical lesson is smaller and sturdier: a date discrepancy between two careful references is not a red flag by itself. A date that appears in no careful reference at all is.

When a date matters to you, say for a family history note or a school project, cite the reference you used and give the range if sources differ. “Coined by Jonathan Swift in the early 18th century” holds up on every source we opened.

One spelling can carry several possible origins

Identical spelling doesn’t guarantee a single source. Names converge from different languages, and a form coined in one place can coincide with an older form somewhere else. Our article on why a name’s origin and its usage can belong to different cultures covers this in depth, and the piece on cognates, variants, diminutives and transcriptions explains how related forms get mislabeled as the same name.

Wendy is a small, telling example. When we checked in October 2026, the Wikipedia article described it as a Welsh feminine given name, without a citation for that statement. Behind the Name says only that it “may be related” to the Welsh name Gwendolen. Etymonline doesn’t mention Welsh at all. Three references, three levels of confidence about the same link.

That’s exactly how a label gets started. An unsourced line in a popular reference is easy to scrape, and once scraped it looks like confirmation. If you see “Welsh origin” on a meaning site, the honest status is “possible connection, not established,” and certainly not a clue to anyone’s ancestry. A name never tells you where a person’s family is from.

How one rank, one story or one famous bearer props up false name meanings

The second set of confounders is about evidence type. Name sites often present a meaning, a popularity rank and a famous bearer side by side, as if they were equally solid facts. They come from completely different kinds of sources, and one can make a weak claim look strong just by sitting next to it.

Popularity data counts names, not meanings

The U.S. Social Security baby name files are built from the first-name field of Social Security card applications. The SSA’s background notes explain that different spellings are not combined and that names with fewer than five occurrences in an area are left out to protect privacy. Nothing in that dataset records why a name was chosen or what anyone thinks it means.

So when a name page shows a real SSA rank next to an unsourced meaning, it has stapled a strong fact to a weak one. The rank is checkable. The meaning may not be. Our explainer on how the SSA baby name data works shows what those files can and can’t tell you.

Shirley shows the subtler version. The SSA history confirms the 1935–36 peak. The explanation for that peak, Shirley Temple’s fame, comes from the name references, not from the data. It’s a very reasonable interpretation, and both references we opened give it. Still, the data shows timing; people supply the reason.

Anecdotes explain something, just not always the etymology

Good name histories are full of stories, and stories are valuable evidence of how a name was used or chosen. The trouble starts when a naming story is promoted into a meaning. The “fwendy” anecdote is attested in sources that the Wikipedia article on Wendy cites, including a 2005 popular-history book. It may well be true. Even if it’s entirely true, it explains how a fictional character got her name, not what the name “means.”

Nevaeh makes a useful contrast. Both Behind the Name and the Wikipedia article on Nevaeh describe it as “heaven” spelled backward, and both tie its spread to the musician Sonny Sandoval of P.O.D. giving the name to his daughter in 2000. Here the construction is the meaning, because the name was built deliberately from a known word. That makes “heaven, reversed” a fair description in a way that “Wendy means friend” isn’t.

Most of those rows lean on Behind the Name and Etymonline together, which brings up a point worth stating plainly: Behind the Name’s own reference list includes the Online Etymology Dictionary. When the two agree, that’s not always two separate investigations. Where we could, we added a third source of a different kind, such as a journal article or a primary-text detail, and the table shows which.

4How to test a name meaning before you repeat it

You don’t need a library card to a research university to catch most false name meanings. You need a few habits that slow you down at the right moments. The checks below take minutes, not days, and they work whether you’re choosing a name, writing about one or just settling a family argument at dinner.

1. Find the claim’s wording in a named reference, not just on a meaning site. If no reference you can name carries it, stop there and treat it as unsupported.
2. Copy down the hedge words exactly. “Probably,” “apparently,” “said to” and “conjecture” are part of the claim.
3. Look for a date and a first appearance: the earliest text, record or work where the name or the explanation shows up.
4. Check that your second source is really separate by seeing what it cites and whether it phrases things differently.
5. Write down the range if they disagree, and decide which version you’ll use and how you’ll word it.

Read the hedges, then read the dates

The fastest way to spot a myth is to compare the confidence of the claim with the confidence of its best source. False name meanings very often carry more certainty than anything it’s built on.

Treat qualifiers as data, not as filler

Careful references use a fairly consistent ladder of wording. “From” or “derived from” signals a well-supported link. “Probably” signals the leading view. “Possibly,” “perhaps” and “apparently” mean the writer is reporting a reasonable guess. “Said to mean” and “traditionally” report what others have claimed. “Conjecture” and “unknown” say there isn’t a basis to choose.

Now run that over the examples above. Behind the Name says Imogen’s source is “probably” Gaelic. Etymonline says Wendy was “apparently” coined. Etymonline calls Pamela’s sweetness gloss “conjecture” and reports Mary’s “rebellion” sense with “said to mean.” Every one of those words was chosen on purpose, and every one of them gets dropped when the claim is flattened into “means.”

A good test: if the hedge in your source is “possibly” and the claim you were about to repeat is “means,” you’ve found the gap. Put the hedge back or don’t use the claim.

Ask where the name or the meaning first appears

Etymology is history, and history needs dates. A strong origin claim can usually point to a first known text, document or work, even if scholars argue about what that text means. Wendy points to Barrie’s work, and its earlier rare uses point to 17th-century records. Imogen points to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Holinshed, Forman’s notes and the First Folio, plus the disputed 1256 charter.

A meaning with no attestation, no date and no named work behind it may still be right. You just have no way of knowing. For older names the dating question gets harder and more interesting, and our guide to researching an ancient name through its earliest forms covers scripts, manuscripts and source quality in more depth than we can here.

Check whether your sources are really independent

The standard advice is to confirm a meaning in two sources. It’s good advice with a catch: the two sources need to have found their answer separately. Otherwise you’re just reading one source twice, with two different logos at the top.

Trace what each source is built on

Reference works borrow from each other all the time, and that’s fine as long as you know it’s happening. Behind the Name is open about this. Its references page lists the works it draws on, including Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges’s A Dictionary of First Names, Elizabeth Gidley Withycombe’s Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names, a shelf of Brill etymological dictionaries, Wiktionary and the Online Etymology Dictionary itself. Its FAQ also explains that user-submitted names carry checkmarks showing what editors have verified.

That transparency is what you want. It also means that Behind the Name agreeing with Etymonline is weaker than it looks. A better second source is something of a different type: a scholarly article, a dictionary with its own research tradition, a primary text. For Imogen, the journal articles by Coates and Uckelman did more to clarify the picture than any number of name sites could.

A meaning site with no references page, no named editors and no dates gives you nothing to trace. You don’t have to assume it’s wrong. You just can’t count it.

Run the same-sentence test

Here’s a quick, low-tech way to spot copy-paste meanings. Take the exact sentence a site gives for a name’s meaning, put it in quotation marks and search for it. If the same wording, with the same odd comma or the same unusual adjective, turns up on many unrelated sites, you’re almost certainly looking at one source copied many times.

Imagine you search a phrase like “a name of strength and grace” (an invented example, used here only to show the method) and get dozens of near-identical pages. That cluster tells you nothing about the name. It tells you about the content pipeline. Independent writers who really looked at the evidence would paraphrase it differently, cite different references and probably disagree on details.

The test works in reverse, too. If two sources word the same conclusion differently and cite different evidence, that agreement is worth more.

When the sources still disagree

Sometimes you do everything right and the evidence still splits. That’s not failure. For many names, a split is the most accurate result available, and you’re better informed than anyone repeating a one-word gloss.

Write down the range, not just the winner

When sources disagree, you can still say something true. You just say it at the right level of confidence. For Imogen, an accurate short version would be: “Usually traced to Innogen, a legendary British name of disputed origin, often linked to a Gaelic word for ‘maiden’ or ‘daughter.'” For Mary: “From Hebrew Miryam; the original meaning is uncertain, with theories including ‘beloved’ and ‘rebellious.'”

Those sentences are longer than “Imogen means innocent.” They’re also something you’d never have to retract. If the range matters to your decision, keep the competing views and the sources in your notes, so you can explain later what you knew and when.

Know when to stop

Some names don’t have a recoverable original meaning. Records are thin, the language is poorly documented, or the name was coined with no explanation at all. Behind the Name’s FAQ makes a related point: some languages have few names in its database “probably because there are few reliable reference materials about names from that language.” That’s an honest description of a real limit, not a gap for a confident guess to fill.

If you’ve checked two genuinely separate references and found nothing, the right answer is “origin uncertain.” Our checklist of name-meaning red flags can help you decide whether a claim you’ve found is merely unproven or actively suspect, and the name origins research guide covers where to look before you give up.

5Choosing or keeping a name when its meaning is shaky

Most readers arrive here with a practical worry, not an academic one. You love a name, or you already gave it, and now you’ve learned its meaning might be wrong. Does that matter? Usually less than it feels like in the moment, and the sections below explain why and what to do instead of panicking.

A reasonable takeaway for parents and other namers

The evidence in this article points one way: meanings are the least stable part of a name’s profile. Sound, spelling, usage history and how the name works in your family’s languages are all easier to check. That doesn’t make meaning worthless. It means meaning should be weighed as what it is, which is often a story with a confidence level attached.

Let meaning be one factor, and label it honestly

If a name’s meaning was your main reason for loving it, try a simple question: would you still like the name if its meaning were listed as “uncertain”? Many people find the answer is yes, because what they actually loved was the sound, a person who carried it or the feel of it. If the answer is no, that’s useful too, and it’s better to learn it now.

Either way, meaning works best as one input among several. Our framework for choosing a name puts it alongside sound, spelling, family fit and practical use, so no single shaky claim carries the whole decision. Also worth remembering: false name meanings are a problem with the claim, not with the name. Pamela isn’t a worse name because Sidney never explained it.

Wording that stays true on a card, a plaque or a child’s question

You don’t need footnotes on a birth announcement. You need wording that won’t embarrass anyone later. A few patterns that hold up:

• When the origin is solid: “Shirley comes from an English place-name and surname, and became a girl’s name after Charlotte Brontë’s 1849 novel.”
• When there’s a leading theory: “Imogen is usually traced to Innogen, possibly from a Gaelic word for ‘maiden.'”
• When the meaning is a later association: “Vanessa was coined by Jonathan Swift; the butterfly came later, and we love that too.”
• When you chose it for a personal reason: “To us it means our grandmother,” which is entirely true and needs no dictionary.

If an older child asks what their name means, the honest version tends to make a better story anyway. “A writer built it from a friend’s name more than 300 years ago” beats “it means butterfly” for most curious kids.

What stays subjective or unresolved

Not every question about a name’s meaning can be settled by better sourcing. Some meanings live in families, communities and faith traditions rather than in etymological dictionaries. Others are simply unknown. Knowing which kind you’re dealing with helps you avoid two opposite mistakes: treating tradition as false and treating guesses as fact.

Personal, family and devotional meanings are real, just different

“Star of the sea” is a good example. On the evidence above, it’s probably not the literal origin of Mary’s name. It’s also a devotional title with a long history of its own, and for many people it is a real part of what the name means to them. Both statements can be true at once.

The same goes for family meanings. A name passed down because of a beloved relative carries that meaning, whatever the dictionary says. The fix is labeling, not erasing: keep “what it means to us” separate from “where the word comes from.” Our explainer on the different layers a name meaning can have sets out that distinction step by step.

Gaps in the reference books are not gaps in the culture

The best-documented cases in this article are English, Latin, Hebrew and Celtic names, because those are the ones with deep reference traditions in English. That’s a limit of the evidence, not a ranking of cultures. For many naming traditions, the most knowledgeable sources are native-language dictionaries, community scholars and the families who use the names, and English-language meaning sites can be especially unreliable there.

So when you’re working with a name from a language you don’t speak, look for sources in that language or from people who know it well, and be wary of English sites that offer one confident gloss and a country label. Meanings also shift as names move between languages, through borrowing, sound change and reinterpretation; our piece on how name meanings change across languages follows that process. And if you want the bigger picture of how scholars study all this, our introduction to onomastics is the place to start.

One last line, and it matters: none of this tells you anything about a person. A name’s origin, real or mythical, is not evidence of someone’s ancestry, religion or nationality.

NameLooks provides general information about names and their histories. Etymologies can be revised as new evidence appears; popularity data describes populations, not individuals; and a name’s origin says nothing about any particular person’s background.