Girl names that mean pearl

Why the pearl, of all the gems

Every other jewel is dug out of rock and then improved. A diamond is cut, a sapphire is faceted, an emerald is polished into the shape someone chose for it. The pearl is the exception, and the exception is complete: it is the only gem made by a living creature, formed in salt water, and finished before anyone finds it. Nothing is ground away. Nothing is added. It is the one jewel that is grown rather than mined.

It is also made by accident, and slowly. A grain of sand works its way inside an oyster; the animal answers by laying down coat after coat of nacre around the intrusion, one thin translucent layer at a time, for years. What began as an irritation ends as the smoothest object in the sea. That image — patience, something precious formed quietly around a difficulty — is why pearl names have not gone out of use in two thousand years.

The pearl is the birthstone of June, and the traditional gift for a thirtieth wedding anniversary: thirty years being roughly how long a fine natural pearl takes to become worth the name. For a daughter born in June, or named for a grandmother married thirty years, the symbolism arrives already assembled.

The Margaret family: one Greek word, a hundred names

Almost every pearl name an English speaker can call to mind belongs to a single family. Its ancestor is Greek μαργαρίτης (margarites), “pearl” — a word the Greeks appear to have borrowed from further east, along the trade routes that brought the pearls themselves. Latin took it as Margarita, early Christian usage made it a woman's name, and from Latin it spread into every language of Europe, each one reshaping it to fit its own mouth.

The result is one of the largest name families on the continent. These are the principal forms.

Czech gives Markéta, Polish Małgorzata, Swedish Margareta, Greek Margarita again in its own alphabet. The pattern holds everywhere: the same five or six sounds, rearranged by local habit, meaning pearl in all of them.

The short forms — which also mean pearl

A nickname keeps the meaning of the name it came from, which is why this second list is not a lesser one. Several of these have been used as full given names for well over a century.

• Daisy

  The most satisfying etymology on this page. The French marguerite is the daisy flower, so Daisy entered English as a translated nickname for Margaret — a pearl name by way of a meadow.

• Greta

  Short form of German and Scandinavian Margarethe. Two syllables, no softness wasted.

• Grete

  The German and Danish variant, said GRET-uh.

• Gretchen

  German diminutive of Grete — the -chen ending is an affectionate “little.”

• Rita

  From Italian Margherita and Spanish Margarita. Independent for generations.

• Maisie

  Scottish, from Mairead. Warm, old-fashioned in the way that is currently an advantage.

• Meg

  The plain English clip of Margaret, and the root of both Megan and Peggy.

• Megan

  Welsh, and honestly a cousin rather than a direct descendant: it is a Welsh diminutive of Meg, so its link to “pearl” runs one step further back than most people assume.

• Peggy

  From Meggy, by the old rhyming habit that also turned Robert into Bob and William into Bill.

• Madge

  An English short form of Margaret with a soft g, common through the nineteenth century.

Names that mean pearl in other languages

Outside the Greek family, several traditions arrived at the pearl through their own words for it. These are the names to consider when the meaning matters more than the familiarity.

• Perla

  Spanish and Italian for “pearl,” from Latin perla. Clean, warm, immediately understood.

• Perle

  The French and German word, used as a given name in both. Said PERL.

• Pérola

  Portuguese, stressed on the first syllable: PEH-roo-luh in Brazil, PEH-ro-luh in Portugal.

• Biserka

  Croatian and Serbian, from Slavic biser, “pearl” — a word that travelled west along the same trade routes as the gem.

• Lulu

  Arabic lu'lu' (لؤلؤ), “pearl,” also written Lu'lu' or Lulua. It has the rare quality of being a serious name and a nickname at once.

• Durr

  Arabic durr, “pearls”; the singular Durrah gives “a pearl.” Also found in the compound Durriya, “glittering.”

• Sadaf

  Persian and Arabic, “seashell, mother-of-pearl” — the pearl named by its own house.

• Gohar

  Persian gohar (گوهر), “gem, jewel, pearl,” and by extension “essence, innate worth.” Used across Iran, Armenia and South Asia.

• Injy

  Egyptian Arabic, “pearl,” from Turkish inci. Said IN-jee.

• Zhenzhu

  Chinese 珍珠, “pearl,” literally “precious pearl”; the element zhen, “precious,” appears widely in given names.

• Marina

  Latin marinus, “of the sea.” Not a pearl name strictly, but it sits beside them so often, and sounds so close to Margarita, that no list is complete without it.

Sea-and-pearl names

A pearl is a sea object, so a small set of names carry both ideas together. This is the smallest group here, and the hardest to fill honestly — most “pearl of the sea” claims turn out on inspection to be a sea name and a pearl name standing next to each other.

• Saelira

  Old English sǣ (“sea”) + Latin lira (“furrow”); borne as “pearl of the sea.” Said say-LEER-uh.

• Marisol

  Spanish, usually explained as a contraction of María Soledad, and universally heard as mar + sol, “sea and sun.”

• Maris

  Latin, “of the sea,” from the title stella maris, “star of the sea.”

• Perlita

  Spanish diminutive of Perla: “little pearl.” Perlita del Mar makes the sea explicit.

• Coralie

  French, from Latin corallium and Greek korallion, “coral” — the pearl's neighbour on the reef.

• Nacrea

  Built on nacre, the French word for mother-of-pearl (itself from Arabic). Genuinely uncommon, and closer to a coined name than an inherited one.

Saelira — the pearl reached from the other direction

Saelira (say-LEER-uh) is a modern European girl's name borne with the meaning “pearl of the sea.” Its elements are the Old English sǣ, “the sea” — the same word behind English sea, German See and Swedish sjö, and already a name-building block in Anglo-Saxon England, where it opens recorded names such as Sæwine (“sea-friend”) and Sæberht (“sea-bright”) — and the Latin lira, “a furrow, a raised ridge,” the word that also produced English delirious, literally “off the furrow.”

Read strictly, that gives furrow of the sea: a wave crest, or the long bright line a hull draws behind it. To a modern ear this sounds oddly agricultural until you notice it is exactly the move Old English poets made constantly — they called the ocean the whale-road and the swan's path, and a ship a surf-stallion. In everyday use the name settled on the warmer sense, the sea's one precious product: pearl of the sea.

Names meaning treasure, gem or precious

If the pearl itself is not the point so much as the idea behind it — something rare, valuable, held carefully — the field opens considerably.

• Gemma

  Italian, “gem, precious stone,” from Latin gemma, which first meant a bud on a vine.

• Esme

  From Old French esmé, “esteemed, loved.” Written Esmé, and said EZ-may.

• Jewel

  English, from Old French joel. Plain-spoken and unmistakable.

• Bijou

  French, “jewel,” from Breton bizou, a ring for the finger.

• Opal

  From Sanskrit upala, “gem, precious stone,” by way of Greek and Latin. October's birthstone.

• Beryl

  Greek beryllos, the pale sea-green stone; the same word, through German, gave us Brille, spectacles.

• Aziza

  Arabic ʿazīza, “precious, beloved, cherished,” from a root meaning both dear and strong.

• Kanti

  Sanskrit kānti, “lustre, radiance, loveliness” — the specific quality a pearl is prized for.

• Elmas

  Turkish, “diamond,” from Persian almās. Also used in Armenian.

• Zaria

  A modern name with more than one home; commonly carried as “princess” or, through Slavic zarya, “dawn.”

• Yara

  Arabic and Persian in one line of use; in Brazil, from Tupi, the name of a lady of the rivers. Borne warmly in all of them as something treasured.

Purity, brightness and the moon

Pearls have been associated with the moon since antiquity — the same soft light, the same round shape, and an old belief that oysters rose at night to catch moonlight and dew. These names do not mean “pearl,” but they carry the qualities the pearl has always stood for, and they pair well with a pearl name in the middle position.

• Luna
• Selene
• Selena
• Clara
• Alba
• Bianca
• Candida
• Ianthe

Luna is Latin for the moon and Selene its Greek equivalent. Clara is Latin clarus, “bright, clear”; Candida is candidus, “shining white,” the root of candid and candle. Alba is “white” and also “dawn,” and Bianca the Italian “white.” Ianthe and its longer relative Iolanthe mean “violet flower” rather than anything lunar, but their sound has kept them in this company for two centuries.

What the pearl has meant

In the European tradition the pearl stands for three things at once, and they reinforce one another. First purity — the unmarked white surface, the gem that needs no correction. Then wisdom: in classical and medieval writing the pearl is repeatedly the figure for a truth worth more than the effort of finding it, which is where the English idiom pearls of wisdom comes from. And finally patience, from the manner of its making — years of quiet layering around something that began as an injury.

The phrase “pearl of great price” entered English from the Gospel of Matthew, where a merchant sells everything he owns to buy one pearl, and it has been proverbial ever since for the thing worth giving up everything else to hold. The fourteenth-century Middle English poem Pearl — from the same manuscript as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight — is an elegy for a lost daughter, and it calls her, from the first line, his pearl. That is very close to what a parent means by the word now.

Perle, plesaunte to prynces paye — “Pearl, pleasing to a prince's delight.”
Pearl, line 1, c. 1400

Questions about pearl names

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Sources & further reading

Greek μαργαρίτης and Latin margarita, perla and lira are entries in Liddell & Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, and Lewis & Short, A Latin Dictionary. The Old English element sǣ and the names built on it are documented in W. G. Searle's Onomasticon Anglo-Saxonicum (1897). The Middle English Pearl survives in a single manuscript, British Library Cotton Nero A.x. Birthstone and anniversary associations follow the modern jewellers' lists in common use in Britain and the United States.

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