How popular is the baby name Melita in the United States right now? How popular was it historically? Use the popularity graph and data table below to find out! Plus, see all the blog posts that mention the name Melita.

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Popularity of the baby name Melita


Posts that mention the name Melita

Baby name story: Victoria Melita

Princess Victoria Melita (1876-1936)
Victoria Melita

In early 1874, Prince Alfred (son of Queen Victoria) married Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna (daughter of Czar Alexander II) in St. Petersburg. Their wedding “directly united the British and Russian royal families for the first time.”

(To mark the occasion, a London bakery invented the Marie biscuit, also known as the Maria cookie.)

Alfred and Maria ended up having five children: Alfred, Marie, Victoria Melita, Alexandra, and Beatrice.

Their third child was born in November of 1876 while her father, a Royal Navy officer, was stationed on the island of Malta (which was then part of the British Empire). The baby girl was named Victoria after her grandmother and Melita after the national personification of Malta, her birthplace.

Where does the name Melita come from?

Most of the time, it derives from the ancient Greek word meli, meaning “honey.” In the case of the allegorical figure, however, it came from the name of an ancient Maltese city.

Melita (or Melite) was the Roman name of the city. The Romans had taken the island from the Phoenicians during the Second Punic War. The Phoenicians’ original name for the city (founded in the 8th century B.C.) was Maleth, meaning “shelter.”

What are your thoughts on the name Melita?

P.S. Victoria Melita’s older sister, Marie, went on to marry the future king of Romania. (Americans became familiar with Marie and two of her children, Nicolae and Ileana, when the three of them toured the U.S. for several weeks in late 1926.) And Victoria Melita’s paternal uncle, the future Edward VII, was the father of Louise, Victoria and Maud, a.k.a., Louvima.

Sources: Princess Victoria Melita of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha – Wikipedia, The marriage of Prince Alfred and Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna – The Royal Collection Trust, Early Inhabitants – Visit Malta
Image: Victoria Melita autograph card

Obscene, but obscure: Yea or nay?

While working on the Phaedra post from earlier this week, I came across the fact that Greek playwright Euripides had two wives: Melite and Choerine.

The name Melite I recognized as coming from the Melissa/Melitta/Melita family. All these names can be traced back to the Greek word meli, meaning “honey.”

But the name Choerine didn’t ring a bell, so I went off in search of a definition.

Before tracking it down, I happened to find this enticing little snippet:

“Choerine” is an attested Athenian name, but it could easily be used for obscene puns.

Obscene puns?!

After more digging, I discovered that Choerine (and the male equivalent Choerus) were based on the Greek word choiros, meaning “pig.” And that the equivalent word in Latin, porcus, had given rise to the names Porcius and Porcia/Portia.

But “pig” isn’t he obscene part:

In classical Latin the word porcus was occasionally used as an informal term for the vulva (Greek choiros, ‘young pig,’ was employed similarly).

Here’s more:

Porcus (pig) was apparently a Roman nursery word for the external pudenda of girls […] Perhaps the allusion is to a perceived resemblance between the part in question and the end of a pig’s snout.

In fact, this obscene sense of porcus is precisely how porcelain came to be named. The word porcelain can be traced back to the Italian word for the cowrie shell, porcellana (“young sow”), which was named in reference to its vulva-like shape.

Now for the question of the day: Would information like this (i.e., obscene-but-obscure associations) ever dissuade you from choosing a particular baby name?

Sources:

  • Laqueur, Thomas Walter. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Harvard University Press, 1990, p. 270.
  • Porcelain – Online Etymology Dictionary
  • “Pork.” Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories, Merriam-Webster, 1991, p. 371.
  • Scodel, Ruth. “The Euripidean Biography.” A Companion to Euripides, ed. by Laura K. McClure, John Wiley & Sons, 2017, pp. 27-41.