Entry № 3112 · Dutch origin

Etty Etty — Meaning, Origin & Baby Name Popularity

/ ET-tee /
Gender
Girl
Origin
Dutch
Meaning
"Pearl (Etty Hillesum, Dutch Jewish diarist of Auschwitz)"
Syllables
2
First recorded
Modern (Dutch)

A name that means "pearl (etty hillesum, dutch jewish diarist of auschwitz)".

Etty is a Dutch diminutive of Esther — from the Hebrew Ester ("star"), or alternately a short form of Henrietta. Etty Hillesum (1914-1943) — *Dutch Jewish writer whose diary, kept from 1941 until her deportation to Auschwitz in September 1943, was published as An Interrupted Life (1981) and stands alongside Anne Frank's Diary as the great spiritual document of the Holocaust. Unlike Anne, she was an adult Amsterdam intellectual (28-29 during the diary years); a Russian-language graduate student undergoing intense psychological analysis. Her decision to share the fate of her people rather than escape — "I have looked our destruction, our miserable end... straight in the eye and accepted it into my life" — has been called one of the great spiritual statements of the 20th century*.

Subject of Patrick Woodhouse's Etty Hillesum: A Life Transformed (2009).

Pearl. Dutch Jewish diarist who chose to share her people's fate; murdered at Auschwitz at 29.

The name in its native script.

Etty
Transliteration
Etty
Pronunciation
/ ˈɛt.i /
Root
Grammatical form

Where Etty stands.

Etty does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.

Ettys before her.

Real people
Etty Hillesum
Dutch Jewish Holocaust diarist.
1914 – 1943
In fiction
Etty
An Interrupted Life.
1981

Names connected to Etty.

The number behind Etty.

7

The Seeker

In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Etty reduce to 7, The Seeker. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.