Greek Girl Names

Greek naming has been feeding the rest of Europe for two and a half thousand years, by three separate routes.

The first is mythological and literary: the goddesses, nymphs and heroines, and the abstract nouns that Greek turned into persons — Nike for victory, Sophia for wisdom, Eirene for peace. Greek's habit of personifying qualities as women is the reason so many European virtue-names are Greek at root.

The second is Christian. Greek was the language of the New Testament and of the Eastern Church, and names like Katherine, Barbara, Anastasia, Eugenia and Theodora spread through Europe on that current rather than through classical learning.

The third is scientific and botanical, which is more recent and easy to miss. A number of flower and star names in this library are Greek because the naturalists who catalogued them worked in Greek — the names came from the taxonomy, not from Greece.

Greek is also unusual in how much it compounds. A great many names are two elements bolted together, and once you can see the joins the meanings open up: -nike is victory, phil- is loving, theo- is god, -dora is gift. Theodora and Dorothea are the same two words in opposite order, as the Atlas gift page notes.