Parents who choose a mythological name are usually buying an association: strength, wisdom, beauty, a bit of northern weather. What they are actually buying is a word in a dead language, and the word is very often stranger than the god.
Some of these names are not names at all but job titles. One is an abstract noun for a mental state that would alarm a modern parent. One cannot be translated by anybody, despite two centuries of trying. And one is a distant cousin of the ordinary English word for a deity.
The Norse ones that started as titles
The clearest case is the pair that Anglophone parents now spell Freya and Frey. In Old Norse, Freyja means "lady" and Freyr means "lord" — ordinary honorifics of the same family as the modern German word for a woman. These are the words a household would use for the people who owned the household.
That has a consequence for mythology as well as for naming. If a goddess's name is a title, the personal name underneath it may be missing, and scholars have argued for well over a century about whether Freyja was originally distinct from Odin's wife or whether two titles ended up as two goddesses. The naming question and the theological question are the same question.
So a child called Freya is, etymologically, called Ma'am. It is still a lovely name, and it has become genuinely common across northern Europe and Britain in recent decades — but the meaning is social rank, not beauty or love.
The name that means fury
Odin is having a modest revival as a given name, generally chosen for connotations of wisdom and command. His name is built on the noun óðr, which covers frenzy, rage, and the ecstatic possession that produces poetry — the god of the mind at its least governed rather than its most orderly. An eleventh-century German churchman describing Scandinavian worship glossed the name in Latin with the single word for madness, and he was not being rude; he was translating.
The English weekday is the same god's name worn down by a thousand years of use, which is a reminder that the most durable mythological naming in the language is not on birth certificates but in the calendar.
Athena, which nobody can translate
Every popular baby-name site will tell you Athena means wisdom. It does not mean anything of the sort, or rather, nobody knows what it means.
The name has no convincing Greek etymology, which usually indicates a word inherited from the pre-Greek languages of the Aegean. Something very like it appears in Bronze Age Linear B tablets as a title of a mistress or lady, and there is a long-running argument about which came first, the goddess or the city — whether Athens was named for its patron or the patron was the goddess of a place called Athens.
It is an unusually honest name, in a way. It carries a whole civilisation's worth of association and no dictionary meaning at all, which is a fair description of what naming does.
Tyr, Zeus, Jupiter and the word "deity"
The single best fact in mythological naming: the Norse god whose name gives English its Tuesday, the Greek sky-father, the Roman one, the Vedic sky-father and the Latin word for a god are all the same inherited word.
The reconstructed ancestor is a term for the bright daylit sky, and its descendants include Tyr, Zeus, Jupiter — a compound with "father" attached, which the Latin vocative preserves — and the Latin deus that gives English deity, divine and adieu. The Vedic sky-father belongs to the same set.
What makes it more than a curiosity is what it implies about status. In Norse mythology the holder of that name is not the chief god at all; he is a specialist in the sworn contest who gives up a hand. Somewhere between the ancestral language and the Viking Age, the god with the inherited sky-father name lost the top job. Nothing in any text explains how, and it is one of the most tantalising unanswered questions in the field — visible only through a name.
Dawn, moon, and rainbow
Latin and Greek offer a set of names that are simply nouns, which makes them the least surprising and most reliable choices.
- Luna is the moon, from a root meaning light that also produced lux. It has risen sharply in Anglophone naming over the past two decades, helped along by fiction, and it is one of the rare cases where the popular meaning and the original meaning coincide exactly.
- Aurora is the dawn, and it is the same inherited word as the Greek Eos and the Vedic Ushas — three dawn goddesses in three traditions descended from one ancestral term, which is about as strong as comparative evidence gets.
- Iris is the rainbow itself. The Greek messenger goddess is the phenomenon personified, travelling between sky and earth because that is what a rainbow does, and the coloured ring of the eye and the flower are both named after her in later scientific and horticultural Latin.
- Diana belongs to the same bright-sky family as Jupiter, which is why the Roman huntress has luminous associations that her Greek counterpart's name lacks entirely.
Apollo, still under argument
Apollo is a genuinely contested case and worth stating carefully, since confident etymologies for him are everywhere and none is settled.
One serious proposal connects the Doric form of the name to the word for the assemblies at which young men were enrolled into the community, making him the god of that institution. Another looks east, to a similar-sounding name in Anatolian material, and argues the god arrived in Greece from outside. There are others. The honest position is that the etymology of one of the most important Greek gods is unresolved, and anyone who tells you it means "destroyer" or "light" is repeating one hypothesis as fact.
The throne that became a name, and then a problem
The Egyptian goddess's name in her own language was written with the sign for a throne, and the standard reading takes the name to mean exactly that — the seat, the thing a king sits on to be king. Her headdress is that sign. It is one of the most elegant pieces of theological naming in the ancient world, and the Isis page sets out how the identification worked.
The modern history of the name is a case study in how naming actually operates. It was a rare but real given name in the English-speaking world, and its registration figures collapsed after 2014 because of an acronym in the news, which is not a fact about Egypt at all. Names carry whatever the world hands them, which is why the practice of picking one for its ancient meaning is always partly optimistic.
What the fashions actually track
Mythological naming is not stable, and the pattern of what rises is legible. Norse names surged with the popularity of a television and film corpus, not with any increase in interest in medieval Iceland. Greek goddess names cluster in periods when parents want names that sound classical without sounding religious. Names that were commonplace a century ago — the flower goddesses, the muses — sound archaic now precisely because they were popular then.
None of this diminishes the practice. Naming a child for a figure in a two-thousand-year-old poem is a real act of transmission, and it is arguably the last living use most of these words have. It just repays five minutes with a dictionary first. Anyone assembling the meaning of a family name will find that story-behind-the-name approach worth the same attention.
Questions people ask when choosing one
Is it disrespectful to use a name from a living religion?
It is worth thinking about, and the answer differs by tradition. Names of Hindu deities are used constantly as given names by Hindus, and have been for millennia — that is the tradition working normally, not an appropriation. The question is sharper when someone outside a living tradition takes a name for its aesthetics while knowing nothing about the figure. The reliable rule of thumb is that using a name with knowledge and respect is very different from using it as decoration.
Do any surnames come from mythology?
Plenty, though usually at a remove. Scandinavian patronymics preserve god-names embedded in personal names — the thunder god's name is a productive element in a whole family of Nordic names for both sexes, which is why so many Danish and Norwegian surnames contain him. Elsewhere the route is through place names: a settlement named for a shrine becomes a family name for the people who came from it.
Which mythological names have changed meaning most in English?
The ones that became common nouns. A vain young man's name became a clinical term, a warning-prophet became a synonym for a doom-monger, a woman's name became a word for an infuriating trial, and a Greek personification of chance underlies the ordinary word for luck. Those are names that stopped being names, which is the opposite direction of travel from everything else in this article.
Are there mythological names that were never used by ancient people?
Many, and the pattern is informative. Greeks and Romans very rarely named children directly after major gods — a theophoric name usually meant "gift of the god" or "belonging to the god" rather than the bare divine name, because taking it outright looked presumptuous. Naming a child Zeus or Jupiter would have struck an ancient parent as bizarre. Directly using the god's own name is a modern habit, and a fairly recent one at that.