Mystery Monday: Kadold

Every Monday we will post an entry that hasn’t yet been published with a view towards harnessing the collective onomastic power of the internet. If you have any thoughts about the name’s origin, other variants it might be related to, other examples of its use, etc., please share them in the comments! If you wish to browse other Mystery Monday names, there is an index.

Today’s name has citations from Austria and the Czech Republic, and is a rare example of a name spelled with K- in Latin. The deuterotheme may be related to Old High German hold ‘friendly, comely, graceful’, but the prototheme is opaque. Do you have any thoughts?

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You want nicknames? We got nicknames!

In dictionary entries, we sort our citations by modern day country borders (because trying to ascertain which country certain towns were in at which period is quite a bit of work — especially when ‘country’ isn’t a viable geographic category for much of the Middle Ages!). One particularly interesting aspect of the multi-cultural/cross-geographic data that we have is that it allows us to trace certain patterns or trends across these boundaries, and one such pattern is the prolificness (or not) of diminutives. We touched on this in the previous post when we briefly commented on the percentage of names that are diminutives in any given era. In this post, we thought we’d explore this further, with some stats and some bar graphs; it’s been too long since we’ve had a nice graph!

Table of diminutive numbers and percentages

Country	No. of dims.	No. of non-dims.	Percentage
Austria	0	60	0%
Brabant	18	191	8.6%
Czech Republic	241	912	18.5%
England	554	15457	3.4%
Estonia	612	905	40.3%
Finland	58	205	22%
France	1181	11744	9.1%
Germany	153	3973	3.7%
Iceland	0	63	0%
Ireland	12	294	3.9%
Italy	525	2387	18%
Latvia	201	1079	15.7%
Malta	0	10	0%
The Netherlands	36	862	4%
Norway	0	3	0%
Poland	21	123	14.5%
Portugal	2	384	.5%
Scotland	47	824	5.3%
Spain	62	1556	3.8%
Sweden	27	589	4.3%
Switzerland	102	543	15.8%
Ukraine	6	82	6.8%
Wales	46	391	10.5%

In some contexts, it is clear that we don’t have enough data to draw any sort of robust conclusions — Austria, Iceland, Malta, Norway, the Ukraine. But omitting these from discussion (and also omitting England, second from the bottom, and France, no. 8, since their much larger numbers make the graph inelegant), we are left with an interesting picture of the relative percentages of nicknames and diminutives across different geographical areas:

The four outstanding areas are Estonia, the Czech Republic, Finland, and Italy. We’ve already discussed the nicknames in Estonia and the Czech Republic when we covered German and Slavic forms; so next up, we will explore diminutive and nicknames forms in Finland and Italy.

Publication of Edition 2015, no. 3

We’re pleased to announce the publication of Edition 2015, no. 3 of the Dictionary, the last edition planned for this year. The new addition has over 1700 entries (up from 1359 in the previous edition), with over 35,900 citations (more than 8,000 more than the previous edition). There are 633 feminine names and 1083 masculine names, and two of uncertain gender. This edition broadens our coverage to the following regions/countries: Ireland, Portugal, Brittany, Wales, Lithuania, Ukraine, and substantially deepens our coverage of the following countries: Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Poland, Estonia, Finland (as well as having new citations for Italy, Germany, France, England, etc.).

Come, spend a few minutes browsing, maybe you’ll find a new favorite name, such as Belhonor or Frotbald or Llywellyn, Wistrilde or revisit old favorites to see what new and unusual spellings you can find.