Everyday LifeGreek → English
Isidore
/ˈɪzɪdɔːr/noun
A male given name, carried by the seventh-century Spanish bishop and encyclopaedist.
The Greek roots
Ἶσις
Îsis
the goddess Isis
δῶρον
dôron
gift
Literally: “gift of Isis”
The story of the word
The name is a Greek build on an Egyptian goddess, made in Hellenistic Egypt where Isis worship spread through the Greek-speaking world and the name pattern of Theodore, Diodorus and Heliodorus was already established. Christians kept using it long after the cult was gone, which is how a bishop of Seville ended up named for an Egyptian deity. Isidore's Etymologiae, an attempt to explain the world by tracing where its words came from, made him the patron saint of the internet by papal suggestion in the 1990s.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
Same family
TheodoreDorothyPandoraanecdote
In a sentence
Isidore had the whole encyclopaedia in twenty volumes and no index worth the name.