Pamela

Pamela was invented rather than inherited. Sir Philip Sidney built it for a character in his prose romance "Arcadia," written in the 1580s, and the Greek pieces behind it spell out "all sweetness": pan, meaning all, and meli, meaning honey. No shepherd or saint carried it first. A poet did.

Then Samuel Richardson chose it for the heroine of his 1740 novel, and the book turned a literary ornament into a name English families actually used. For a long time it stayed rare outside English-speaking countries, which is why a Pamela on a Polish class register still reads as a borrowing from abroad.

The meaning has held its shape. Greek honey sits under the whole word, and "all sweetness" is what the name still says. In Polish the same idea comes out plainly: cała słodycz.