The ten entries listed here are all familiar first names – from ABIGAIL and ANDREW to JIMMY and JOHN – that can be used in English as words in their own right. Whilst some of these terms are derived in some way from the names in question, often the similarity is coincidental and both the name and its alternative meanings are etymologically entirely unconnected.
Derived from the Hebrew for ‘father rejoices’, the first name Abigail has been used in English since the early 1600s as another word for a female attendant or maid. Use of the name in this context derives from the Bible, wherein Abigail was the humble wife and handmaid of King David, but in the early eighteenth century it was further reinforced by the appointment of Lady Abigail Masham as one of the chambermaids and eventual royal favourites of Queen Anne. This association eventually led several notable authors including Jonathan Swift, Charles Dickens and Henry Fielding to christen a number of maids and servants in their works Abigail, amongst them Miss Abbey Potterson, the schoolmarmish landlady of the Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters pub in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend.
Andrew is derived from the Greek word for ‘man’, andros, which is the same root for words like androgeny, anthropology and philander. The name’s somewhat general meaning led to its use in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in English as simply another word for a valet or manservant, but over time a number of more specific meanings have developed: a merry-andrew is another word for a fool or a clownish assistant, popularly claimed to be derived from the name of Andrew Boorde, the court physician to Henry VIII, whilst Andrew is also used as another name for a ship in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (V. i) in reference to the St Andrew, one of two grand Spanish galleons captured by Walter Raleigh at Cadiz in 1596.
The name George is derived from the Greek for ‘farmer’ or literally ‘earth-worker’, and as such is descended from the same root as words like geography, geometry and geology. George has a number of different uses in English, including as a form of address for a male stranger; an exclamation of surprise or amazement, as in by George!; another word for a loaf of bread, a term once popularly used amongst Oxford University students; and a slang term for a one-year prison service. By far the most prolific use of the name in English, however, is as a nickname for various coins and items of currency – in the United States, a george can be either a twenty-five cent piece or a dollar bill, both of which bear the image of George Washington, whilst in Britain the name has variously been used as another name for a ‘noble’, worth 6s 8d (late 1500s), a half crown (mid-1600s), a golden guinea (late 1700s) and a pound coin (late 1700s), most of which bore an image either of St George or of one of England’s many King Georges.
Helena is the Latin form of the Greek name Helen, which is in turn derived from the Greek word for a torch, helene. In the sixteenth century, the name was used as another word for the unusual maritime phenomenon, corposant, in which a gaseous, luminous haze created by the ionization of air molecules in the electrical field produced by a thunderstorm appears around the topmost masts of a ship. Also known as St Elmo’s fire (a corruption of the name ‘Erasmus’, the patron saint of sailors), the phenomenon’s alternative name Helena derives, like the name itself, from an Ancient Greek tradition wherein a single such ball of light was known as Helena, and a pair were known as Castor and Pollux, after Helena’s twin brothers in Greek legend.
Named after the eighteenth- to nineteenth-century American physicist Joseph Henry, the henry has been the official SI unit for electrical inductance since 1946. As well as this, the name Henry – derived from an old Germanic name meaning ‘home ruler’ – has a number of other uses in the language, including as a type of rifle, named after the noted nineteenth-century Scottish gunsmith Alexander Henry, and as an early twentieth-century American epithet for a car, named after Henry Ford, the American industrialist and founder of the Ford Motor Company. In cockney rhyming slang, meanwhile, a henry can variously refer to a ‘word’ (Henry the Third), a ‘motorcycle’ (Henry Fonda, rhyming with ‘Honda’), and the ‘devil’ (Henry Neville, a nineteenth-century euphemism for ‘Hell’, as in HEnry NeviLLe).
Both James and its pet form Jimmy can be used in English as another name for a crowbar, presumably due to their similarity to the tool’s eighteenth-century name jemmy and to the influence of the rhyming slang phrase jimmy rook, meaning ‘hook’. James, which is the English equivalent of the Latin name Jacob, is derived from the Hebrew word for ‘heel’ as, according to the Bible, Jacob was born clutching the heel of his twin brother Esau. The biblical tale of Jacob’s Ladder, meanwhile, led to burglars who use ladders to break into houses being known as jacobs in the nineteenth century.
Of all first names to have alternative meanings in English, John (derived from the Hebrew for ‘God is gracious’) is perhaps the most productive. Amongst its many meanings, John can denote a policeman, a butler or manservant, a priest, an Englishman, a lavatory, a signature, a type of plant, an unknown person, a cuckold or hen-pecked husband, and even the client of a prostitute. In the vast majority of these senses, it is simply the commonness of the name John that has led to its use, but nonetheless some of these meanings do have more curious origins. The use of the word for a policeman, for instance, is based on an English corruption of the French word gendarme, whilst its use for a signature is derived from John Hancock, a former Governor of Massachusetts whose elaborate signature dwarfs those of all the other signatories on the American Declaration of Independence.
Written by the Australian poet Banjo Paterson in the mid-1890s, the Australian folksong ‘Waltzing Matilda’ tells the story of an itinerant traveller or ‘swagman’ who sets up camp ‘by a billabong / Under the shade of a coolabah tree’, where he steals and kills a ‘jumbuck’ (sheep), before drowning himself in the waters when the ‘squatter’ (farmer) and three ‘troopers’ (policemen) confront him. It ends, ‘And his ghost may be heard as you pass by that billabong: “Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?”’ The song is renowned for its use of many traditional Australian words and phrases, including those in its title: waltzing does not mean ‘dancing’ here but rather ‘wandering’ or ‘journeying’ (derived from the German expression auf der Walz, meaning ‘to travel from job to job’), whilst despite popular belief Matilda is not the name of the swagman’s sweetheart but rather his bag. Derived from an old Germanic name meaning ‘mighty in battle’, quite why Matilda has this meaning in Australian slang is unclear, but it has been suggested that travellers often gave their belongings female nicknames as they were essentially their only companions on their otherwise solitary journeys.
The name Oliver is thought to have entered into use in English either as a variant of the Scandinavian name Olaf, as a descendant of the Germanic name Alfihar (literally meaning ‘elf-host’), or else as a derivative of the Latin word for an olive tree, olivarius. Whatever its origin, the word has since developed a number of different uses in the language, including as the name of a type of tilt hammer used in ironworking; an eighteenth-century slang name for the moon (presumably due to the shape of the letter O); a deliberate mistake entered into a bookkeeper’s ledger (from rhyming slang Oliver Twist, meaning ‘fist’); and, as found in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, an alternative name for the olive tree itself. Oliver and Roland together can also be used to refer to any equally or ideally matched pairing, as they were the names of two favourites of the Roman Emperor Charlemagne who, having been unable to beat each other in combat, were considered all but invincible together.
Derived from the Latin paullus, meaning ‘little’ or ‘small’, the name Paul was recorded as far back as the mid-sixteenth century in English as the name of an Italian gold coin struck during the reign of Pope Paul III, which also bore an image of St Paul. More recently, Paul is also the name of a device used to trap ions named after its inventor, the twentieth-century German physicist Wolfgang Paul. Besides these somewhat obscure uses, Paul also appears in various words and expressions referring to St Paul’s Cathedral – a Paul’s foot, for instance, is an obsolete unit of measurement equal to the length of the foot of a statue of Ethelgar, a tenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury, found in St Paul’s; a Paul’s-walker is a gossipmonger or timewaster who would typically be found chattering in the nave of St Paul’s; and Paul’s work is a mess or a botched job, such as that that would be done by a Paul’s-walker.