Gifted
A very dear friend recently sent me a real treasure of a gift. It is a baby name book that was published in 1953 with an original publication date of 1946 ("What to Name the Baby" by Evelyn Wells). I've been thumbing through it ever since and delighted to happen upon names that I've never seen before.
Bear in mind that I own or have looked at every baby name book that you would find at your big box bookseller and I have ordered some that are more off the beaten path. I've seen a lot of names. I have a book that claims to list 40,001 of the best names but in order to meet that magic numbers it includes entries like, "Diamondique" and then counts "Diamondik" as another version (and, no, the pronunciation of that second one isn't clear to me either). This book is great, actually. Its loaded with so many invented definition and crazy names it should have been sold in the fiction section. For instance, it includes the name Homer in the girls' section and lists the meaning as "tomboyish". So, by great I mean it makes me want to set my hair on fire.
Back to my book. I'm not saying that this book has your run-of-the-mill unusual names like Odiline or Mehitabel or Hedvige. I'm talking names I've NEVER seen before. And unlike a lot of unusual names that just pop up in a list of names related to a less obscure main entry (like finding Odiline under the entry "Adele") some of these names came with lengthy entries of their own. Squee!
Some examples:
Acca - the name of the foster mother of Romulus and Remus.
Azalais - a Provencal form of Alice.
Ailive - meaning "elf darling".
Alalia - "non-talkative".
Alula - a star in Ursa Major. (Sounds so charming and lilting and spacey enough to suit your average hippie but can't you just imagine it on a pink-haired diner waitress? Alula May Huggins or something?)
Araxia - for the river Araxia in Armenia.
Axah - variant of Achsah meaning "a tinkling anklet".
And that's just the A's!
I was really surprised to see the name Alyssa which I had assumed was Alyssa Milano's parents' bastardization of Elisa. Wells relates it to the flower called sweet alyssum. Huh.
Time to read the B's.
