Everyday LifeGreek → English
Evander
/ɪˈvændər/proper noun
A male given name, borne in Roman legend by the Arcadian exile who settled the Palatine before Rome existed.
The Greek roots
εὖ
eû
well, good
ἀνήρ
anḗr
man
Literally: “good man”
The story of the word
Virgil makes Evander the old king who gives Aeneas his first Italian welcome and then hands over his son Pallas to fight and die. Roman antiquarians credited him with bringing the Greek alphabet to Italy, a tidy story for a transmission that actually ran through Etruscan hands. Name books also record the form in Scotland as a stand-in for the Gaelic Iomhar, matched on sound rather than on sense.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
Same family
eulogyeuphemismandroidpolyandry
In a sentence
Evander is the only one of the cousins with a name nobody can spell on the first try.