German names

German is a living language spoken by roughly 95 to 100 million people as a first language, chiefly in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and one of the major languages of the world. The names collected here reach English through that modern language and the culture it carries, not through the reconstructed ancient vocabulary gathered under the Germanic tag. Many of them still trace back to those old elements. Parents meet them, though, as living German names, carried by German books, songs, and everyday speech.

Heidi is a German short form of Adelheid, the name that gave English its Adelaide. It goes back to Old High German elements meaning noble, or more loosely of noble birth. Its reach far beyond German-speaking homes owes almost everything to Johanna Spyri's 1881 novel Heidi, about an orphan girl in the Swiss Alps, which remains the main reason English-speaking parents know the name.

Lorelei is the name of a steep slate rock on the Rhine near Sankt Goarshausen, where the current and an echo once made a murmuring sound. The name joins old German words for murmuring and rock. Clemens Brentano invented a maiden for the rock in 1801, and Heinrich Heine's 1824 poem Die Lorelei fixed her as a siren whose song drew boatmen to their wreck. The spelling Lorelai reached a later generation of parents through the television series Gilmore Girls. Annalise, in the same family, is a German blend of Anna and Liese, itself a short form of Elisabeth.

Frank is the plain German and English form of a name tied to the Franks, the people who gave their name to France and to Franconia. The common gloss free comes from the standing of the Franks as the free class in early medieval Gaul, though the origin of the tribal name itself is debated, with some tracing it to a word for a javelin. These sit alongside the rest of this small library, Lorelai and Alina, Arlette and Adelyn, each carried into English usage by the living German language rather than by the ancient elements alone.