Pamela

The story of the word

Sir Philip Sidney invented it for a princess in his Arcadia around 1580, assembling it from Greek pieces that produce something like all-sweetness. It stayed a book name for a century and a half until Samuel Richardson's Pamela in 1740 made it a name real parents used. Sidney stressed it Pa-ME-la, and eighteenth-century verse still rhymes it that way. The honey root also gives Melissa, which is Greek for bee.

How it travelled

Ancient Greek → literary coinage → English

First recorded

around 1580