The Atlas · Gift

Gift

A child understood as something given.

213 names · 71 traditions

The Indo-European root for giving, reconstructed as *deh₃-, gives Latin dōnum, Greek dôron and Sanskrit dāna, and every one of them is productive in naming.

The Greek pair Theodora and Dorothea are the same two elements — theos, god, and dōron, gift — in opposite order, meaning exactly the same thing. They have been in use side by side for well over fifteen hundred years, and most people who carry one have no idea the other is its mirror.

Hebrew supplies several: names built on natan, he gave, and on matan, a gift, along with the very widely used group meaning God has given. Arabic hiba, 'atiyya and ni'ma cover gift, bestowal and blessing with distinctions that English collapses.

West African naming is unusually direct here. A great many Yoruba, Igbo and Akan names on this page state plainly that the child was asked for, waited for, or received — Abeni, we prayed for her, being one of many. These are not abstractions but statements about a particular family and a particular birth, which is a different mode of naming from the European virtue-name tradition and worth reading on its own terms.

Every tradition, side by side

Ukrainian 4
Japanese 4
Urdu 3
Spanish 3
Punjabi 3
Breton 3
Old Norse 3
Persian 2
Polish 2
Portuguese 2
Croatian 2
Slavic 2
Bemba 2
Russian 2
Faroese 2
Old English 2
Icelandic 2
Yoruba 2
Finnish 2
Sesotho 2
Tsonga 2
Romanian 2
Xhosa 2
Anglo-Saxon 1
Turkish 1
Ethiopian 1
Latin 1
Bulgarian 1
Lithuanian 1
Slovak 1
Slovenian 1
Dutch 1
Irish 1
Maltese 1
Hungarian 1
Albanian 1
Somali 1
Mayan 1
Luganda 1
Hausa 1
Hawaiian 1
Samoan 1
West African 1
Hindi 1
Sotho 1
Akan 1
Serbian 1
Georgian 1
Scottish 1
Macedonian 1
Gagauz 1
Amazigh 1
Ewe 1
Armenian 1
Yiddish 1