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Jessica

proper nouncommon in dialogue

  • //ˈd͡ʒɛsɪkə//

A female given name from Hebrew.

proper noun

  1. 1

    A female given name from Hebrew.

    Lorenzo: In such a night / Did Jessica steal from the wealthy Jew, / And with an unthrift love did run from Venice, / As far as Belmont.

    She will be beautiful, of course - how could our child not be beautiful? We will name her...Jessica. Yes, that's a good name, not one of those lighter-than-air names so popular among writers of romances and fairy tales. That's a name a real little girl might have.

    Jessica. It was, she later thought, a name well suited to whitehaired ladies with bright blue eyes.

    The first line of dialogue is from an off-screen Field Commander Melissa Lewis (Jessica Chastain), asking the team to stay in sight and “make NASA proud”.

Etymology

First used by William Shakespeare in Merchant of Venice in the early 17th century, probably from Hebrew יִסְכָּה (yiská, “Iscah in Genesis 11:29, Jescha in the Wycliffe version”), a proper name meaning "he will see/behold/look for", the 3ms imperfect form of a verb ultimately from the root ס־כ־ה (s-k-h), itself an alternative form of the root שׂ־כ־ה (ś-k-h), both of which mean "to see, behold, look for". * By folk etymology seen as an elaborate form of Jessie, from Jane.

Forms

plural
Jessicas
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).