Vanessa

proper nouncommon in dialogue

//vəˈnɛsə//

A female given name originating as a coinage.

proper noun

1
A female given name originating as a coinage.
Vanessa be the Name / By which thou shalt be known to Fame. / Vanessa, by the Gods enroll'd: / Her Name on Earth - shall not be told.
A kind of girl that May had before only seen in the pages of fashion magazines, bored, disdainful, elegant, reluctantly admitted her. - - - She was asked to see Vanessa on the way out. She knew that the girl would be called something like Vanessa.
Vanessa likes the ultrapopular Madison as a girl's name, which tells you everything you need to know about her personality.
Democrats called for investigation, not resignation, after Vanessa Tyson accused Justin Fairfax of sexual assault earlier this week.

Etymology

Coined by Jonathan Swift in the 18th century as a pseudonym for a lady friend named Esther Vanhomrigh (or Van Homrigh), an Irish woman of Dutch descent, by taking the Dutch preposition van from her surname and adding -essa (perhaps influenced by the first syllable of Esther).

Vancouver · A surname.vandalism · Willful damage to or destruction of any property, such as…vanessa · Any butterfly of the genus Vanessa.

Vanessa · A female given name originating as a coinage.

vanilla · Any tropical climbing orchid of the genus Vanilla (especially…vanish · To become invisible or to move out of view unnoticed.vanished · No longer apparent; not extant; gone.

The neighbouring pages — Alphabetical 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.