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Greek names

From Greek myth, the New Testament, and twenty-five centuries of philosophy. Names that come with a built-in story.

126 names in the library

Greek is one of the world's oldest continuously recorded languages. Its earliest written form, Mycenaean Greek, survives on clay tablets in the Linear B script from roughly the sixteenth to the twelfth centuries BC. The same language, later written in the Greek alphabet, has been recorded ever since, and it is still spoken today in Greece and Cyprus. The names carried in that long record reach English along two great streams: the mythological and heroic names of the ancient world, and the Christian names of saints spread through the Orthodox and the wider church.

The older stream comes from myth, epic, and ordinary Greek words. Penelope is the faithful wife in Homer's Odyssey, though her name has been debated since antiquity, tied by some to pene, a thread on the loom, and by others to a kind of duck. Chloe was a common word for the green shoots of spring and served as an epithet of Demeter, goddess of the harvest. Zoe is simply the Greek word for life. Greek-speaking Jews used it to translate the name Eve, and early Christians took it up for its sense of everlasting life. These names entered English carrying their plain meanings largely intact.

The second stream is Christian. As the church honored its saints, Greek names traveled far beyond Greece, and many are built from a small set of repeating parts. Nike means victory, theos means god, philos means loving, and andros is the genitive of the word for man. Nicholas joins nike and laos, people, for victory of the people. Theodore pairs theos and doron, gift, for gift of God. Alexander combines alexein, to defend, with andros, giving defender of men. Anastasia comes from anastasis, resurrection, a fitting name in a faith centered on Easter.

Greek names became foundational in English through three channels: the Greek text of the New Testament, the veneration of saints, and the classical revival that made ancient names fashionable again. Some glosses remain contested. Katherine is often read as pure, from katharos, but that link is probably a later association, and the name's true origin is uncertain. The library gathers both streams together. Alexander and Alexandra, Nicholas, Theodore, and Anastasia carry the roots of the church, while Sophia (wisdom), Zoe, Chloe, Penelope, and Melody (song) carry the older Greek words, and the same building blocks recur from one name to the next.

Names in the library

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