Entry № 5958 · German origin

Lise Lise — Meaning, Origin & Baby Name Popularity

/ LEE-zuh /
Gender
Girl
Origin
German
Meaning
"God is my oath (Lise Meitner, discovered nuclear fission)"
Syllables
1
First recorded
Modern (German)

A name that means "god is my oath (lise meitner, discovered nuclear fission)".

Lise is a German-French short form of Elisabeth. Lise Meitner (1878-1968) was the Austrian-Swedish physicist who, in 1938, with her nephew Otto Frisch first interpreted Otto Hahn's experimental results as nuclear fission — coining the term. Hahn alone received the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery; Meitner's exclusion remains one of the most notorious oversights in Nobel history. *Element 109, Meitnerium, is named after her — and a 2008 movie Lise Meitner* dramatized her story.

Refused to work on the Manhattan Project, saying: "I will have nothing to do with a bomb."

God is my oath. Discovered nuclear fission; her nephew called her exclusion from the Nobel "a great injustice."

The name in its native script.

Lise
Transliteration
Lise
Pronunciation
/ ˈliː.zə /
Root
Grammatical form

Where Lise stands.

Lise 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.

Lises before her.

Real people
Lise Meitner
Austrian-Swedish physicist.
1878 – 1968
In fiction
Lise
Subject of Lise Meitner film.
2008

Names connected to Lise.

The number behind Lise.

9

The Giver

In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Lise reduce to 9, The Giver. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.