Melissa

Melissa comes straight from the Greek word for a bee, μέλισσα. The insect gave the name its meaning. Greek writers used the same word for the priestesses who tended certain temples, women linked to honey and to the goddesses they served. The sense of "bee" belongs at the origin here rather than as a gloss added afterward.

English readers met the name through poetry and romance. In Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, printed in English by John Harington in 1591, Melissa is a good enchantress who guides and rescues. That literary route helped carry the name into ordinary English use, far from its Greek temple.

The bee never left. On a Polish class register Melissa reads as foreign yet easy to say, and at the urząd it fills a form without trouble. In Polish the name still points to pszczoła, the bee.