Daisy

Daisy comes straight from the flower, and the flower answers to an old English name: day's eye. The bloom shuts at dusk and reopens at first light, so watchers of fields once read it as an eye that tracks the sun. The Latin thread arrives by another route. In Victorian England Daisy served as a pet form of Margaret, since the French call the flower marguerite, and marguerite descends from Latin margarita, meaning pearl.

So a small white flower and a pearl sit inside one short name.

Literature kept it in circulation. Henry James published Daisy Miller in 1878, and a few decades later F. Scott Fitzgerald handed the name to Daisy Buchanan. On a Polish class register the name still looks unmistakably English, filed beside its plain translation, stokrotka.