In 2014 I featured a series of blog posts introducing you to 2,014 names. For the most part they were names that were brand new to me as well. Some names may be more familiar but I found the meaning or origin or some other aspect of the name made it worthy of inclusion here. You may love some of the names, you may hate some, but hopefully you enjoy learning about all of them.

Friday, January 10, 2014

70 + 7

As of yesterday I've introduced you to 70 new names in 2014. Here are 7 more. If you're keeping track, that means that there are still 1,937 names to go over the rest of the year.

Girls

Sayard - a Teutonic personal name, derived from the Anglo Saxon 'sae' meaning "sea" and 'weard' meaning "keeper"  so the meaning of Sayard would be "keeper of the sea" or "guardian of the sea". The earlier form of Sayard would have been Sayward or Saward and pronounced by Anglo Saxons as something like "soward". However I encountered the name in a movie and it was pronounced 'saird', and one character in the movie, more educated, corrects the backwoods girl with this name telling her it should be Sayward and pronounces it "say ward". Seward is another form of the same name. I found a reference that says that the high admiral of the Saxons was called a saward or sayward (or seward). I think of it as 'sea warden'.

Talitha - Aramaic, meaning "little girl". It is part of what Jesus says when he brings a little girl back to life in the Bible. There is also an Arabic word which it may be derived from. I came across two different pronunciations for this, 'tal ih tha' and 'tuh lee tha'. I like both.

Undine - a word invented by Paracelsus in the middle ages to describe female water spirits. It comes from the Latin word 'unda' which means 'wave'.

Viridiana - Latin, meaning "green".


Boys 

Wendell -Germanic, derived from the name Wendelin, meaning "wanderer". Wendelin comes from the name of an ancient Slavonic tribe called the Wends, who lived among German settlements and were associated with the Vandals. Wendelin became a first name by first becoming a nickname for names beginning with Wendel--.

Xerxes - Persian, meaning "ruling over heroes"

Yaegar - German, meaning "hunter".

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