Sophia (given name)

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Sophia (given name)

Sophia, also spelled Sofia, is a feminine given name, from Greek Σοφία, Sophía, "Wisdom". Other forms include Sophie, Sophy, and Sofie.

Quick Facts Gender, Origin ...
Sophia
A statue of Sophia, the personification of wisdom, in the Celsus Library in Ephesus, Turkey.
Genderfeminine
Origin
Word/nameGreek
Derivationfrom Greek Σοφία, Sophía
MeaningWisdom[1]
Region of originByzantine Empire
Other names
Alternative spellingSofia
Variant form(s)Sophie, Sophy
Related namesSofija, Sofiya, Sofya, Sophus
See alsoSonia
Close
A depiction of Saint Sophia and Her Three Daughters, Faith, Hope and Charity (icon of the Novgorod school, 16th century).
Sophia Loren in 1955

History

The given name is first recorded in the beginning of the 4th century.[2]

Popularity

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Perspective

Sophia is a common female name in the Eastern Orthodox countries. It became very popular in the West beginning in the later 1990s and became one of the most popularly given girls' names in the Western world in the first decades of the 21st century.[citation needed]

Sophia was known as the personification of wisdom by early Christians and Saint Sophia is also an early Christian martyr. Both associations contributed to the usage of the name.[citation needed] The name was comparatively common in continental Europe in the medieval and early modern period.[citation needed] It was popularized in Britain by the German House of Hanover in the 18th century.[citation needed]

It was repeatedly popularised among the wider population, by the name of a character in the novel Tom Jones (1794) by Henry Fielding, in The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) by Oliver Goldsmith, and in the 1960s by Italian actress Sophia Loren (b. 1934).[citation needed]

Sophia was comparatively popular in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century; its use declined in the 1920s to 1950s; it became again moderately popular during the 1960s to 1980s.[citation needed]

During the 1990s to the 2010s, the popularity of the name rose dramatically in many countries throughout the western world. Suggested influences for this trend include Sofía Vergara and Sofia Coppola (popular from the late 1990s) and Sofia Hellqvist (popular from the 2000s).[3] [4][5] Sophia and variants of the name remain among the most currently[when?] popularly given names for girls in countries across Europe as well as countries in North and South America, Australia, New Zealand, and others.[6]

In 2022, Sophia was the fifth most popular name given to girls in Canada, while Sofia was 13th.[7]

Name variants

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Perspective

Greek Σοφία was adopted without significant phonological changes into numerous languages, as Sophia (German, and thence English) and Sofia (Romance languages, and thence also to Germanic languages and Finnish, etc.).[citation needed] The spelling Soffia is Icelandic and Welsh.[citation needed] Hungarian has Zsófia.[citation needed] Modern Spanish uses the acute diacritic, Sofía.[citation needed] South and East Slavic and Baltic languages have Sofija (Софија), Sofiya (София) and Sofya (Софья).[citation needed] West Slavic (Polish and Czech-Slovak) introduced a voiced sibilant, Zofia, Žofia, Žofie.[citation needed]

French has the (disyllabic) hypocoristic Sophie, which was also introduced in German, Dutch/Flemish, English, and Scandinavian in the spelling Sofie and Sophy.[citation needed] A Dutch hypocoristic is Sofieke.[citation needed] Russian has the hypocoristic Соня (Sonya), which in the late 19th century was introduced to Western languages, in the spellings Sonya, Sonia and Sonja, via characters with this name in the novels Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1866, English translation 1885) and War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1869, English translation 1886).[citation needed]

Turkish Safiye is from the unrelated Arabic Safiyya (صفية "pure").[citation needed]

Persian Sofia (Persian: صوفیا) is from unrelated Sufi, a sect of Islam.[citation needed]

People, fictional characters, and deities with the names include

Saints

Royalty

Sofia

Sophia

Other versions

Arts and entertainment

Sports

Others

Fictional characters

See also

References

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