Penelope
/pəˈnɛləpi/noun
The wife of Odysseus in the Odyssey; also a given name, and a byword for patient fidelity.
The Greek roots
Literally: “possibly thread-stripper, possibly duck”
The story of the word
The name resists explanation. One reading takes it from pēnélops, a kind of duck, attached to a story in which the infant was thrown into the sea and carried ashore by birds; another splits it into pḗnē, the thread on a loom, and a verb for stripping away, which fits the wife who unpicks her day's weaving every night to keep the suitors waiting. The second may well be the poem explaining a name it inherited rather than the true source. English families began using it as a given name in the sixteenth century.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
Same family
In a sentence
Twenty years of Penelope at the loom, and the poem gives her about six hundred lines.
They named the second daughter Penelope after a great-aunt.