Megan

Megan reaches back to the Greek word margaritēs, meaning pearl. It travelled through Margaret, the older name that Welsh speakers clipped down to Megan before the wider English-speaking world took it up. A short, plain name holds a jewel at the far end of its history.

For a long while Megan lived as a Welsh pet form of Margaret, then set out on its own across Britain and the United States. One documented bearer is Megan Lloyd George, elected for Anglesey in 1929 as the first woman to represent a Welsh constituency in Parliament. The pearl was never literal. That meaning arrived with Margaret and stayed as a gloss, a note people find when they look the name up.

Now Megan turns up on Polish class registers too, read out at roll call among the Amelias and Zuzannas. The sense behind it does not change with the setting: pearl, from the Greek margaritēs.