Nora

Nora has long been at home in Ireland and Britain, where it grew out of two longer names. Behind the Name traces it to Honora, a form of the Roman Honoria that the Normans carried into England and Ireland, and to Eleanor. English Wiktionary puts Eleanor first and calls the Honora link rare. The Irish spelling Nóra and the pet forms Nóirín and Noreen belong to the same family.

Of the two parent names, Honora is the easy one: it rests on the Latin honor, meaning honour. Eleanor is harder. It reached English through Old French from the Occitan Alienòr, and an old account reads that as the Latin alia Aenor, 'the other Aenor', for a girl named after her mother. Behind the Name, drawing on a dictionary of medieval names, notes that the name seems to appear earlier than that story allows, so the question is still open. Nora therefore has no single neat translation.

There is also an unrelated Arabic Nora, an alternative transcription of Nura from the word nur, light. Across Europe the Eleanor family branches widely: Noor and Noortje in Dutch, Noora in Finnish, Nóra in Hungarian, Leonora in Italian, Leonor in Portuguese and Enora in Breton. In English the name is said NOR-uh, with the stress on the first syllable.

Short and soft, Nora sits well before a longer middle name such as Nora Elizabeth, Nora Catherine or Nora Josephine, while Eleanor as a middle name nods to its roots. As sisters and brothers, Alice, Iris, Hugo and Arthur share its plain, classic sound.