According to the custom of English-speaking people, when a baby is baptized, it is called the Christian name by the priest or parents or relatives. In the future, I can take a second name after my Christian name. The sources of English names are as follows:
1. Use the names in the Bible, Greek and Roman mythology, ancient celebrities or literary masterpieces as Christian names.
2. Take the names of ancestral places, mountains and rivers, birds and animals, fish and insects, flowers and trees as Christian names.
3. Different variants of Christian names.
Step 4 use nicknames.
5. Use word formation to create new Christian names, such as reverse order and merger.
6. Take the mother's maiden name as the middle name.
Extended data
The origin of English surnames:
For a long time, the British had only a first name and no last name. It was not until the16th century that the use of surnames became widely popular. According to experts' estimation, there are as many as 6.5438+0.5 million surnames in English-speaking countries.
Professor Zhou Haizhong, a famous scholar in China, pointed out in his paper on English names published in 1992:
There are about 3,000 common English surnames, among which the top ten are Smith, Jones, Williams, Brown, Davis, Johnson, Anderson, Taylor, Thomas and Evans. Its population accounts for about half of the English population.
According to a recent survey, the top ten British surnames are still in the same order. The etymology of English surnames mainly includes:
1. Borrow Christian names directly, such as Clinton.
2. Add affixes to Christian names to express blood relationship, such as suffixes -s, -son,-ing; Prefixes M'-, Mc-, Mac-, Fitz-, etc. Both mean the son or descendant of so-and-so
3. Attach identity affixes before Christian names, such as St.-, De-, Du=, La-, Le-.
4. Reflect place names, landforms or environmental features, such as streams and mountains.
5. Reflect identity or occupation, such as Carter and Smith.
6. Reflect personal characteristics, such as: black, Longfellow.
7. Borrow animal and plant names, such as birds and rice.
8. From the combination of two surnames, such as Edward Burne-Jones.
References:
Baidu encyclopedia-English name