Brenda (given name)
| Gender | Feminine |
|---|---|
| Language(s) | English |
| See also | Brendan |
Brenda is a feminine given name in the English language.
The overall accepted origin for the female name Brenda is the Old Nordic male name Brandr meaning both torch and sword: evidently the male name Brandr took root in areas of the British Isles under Nordic dominance and through being heard as '"Brenda" was eventually adopted as a female name. The name Brenda was probably influenced by the iconic Gaelic male name Brendan: although linguistically it is unlikely that the name Brendan would yield the name Brenda as its feminine form, the name Brenda is widely considered a feminine form of the name Brendan in Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
Occurring in the medieval legend of Madoc - the purported son of the 12th century historical Welsh ruler Owain Gwynedd by Brenda the daughter of a Viking overlord in Ireland - the name Brenda was apparently until the 19th century confined to the Northern Isles being an evident remnant of the Northern Isles' Norse rule from 875 to 1470. The name's utilization by Sir Walter Scott for the heroine of his 1821 novel The Pirate - set in Orkney - is credited with bringing the name Brenda into general usage throughout the British Isles: although the initial appearance of The Pirate did not generate any evident vogue for the name Brenda, usage of the name in the British Isles increased steadily over the next hundred years with the name Brenda ranking for the first time as a top 100 name for newborn girls in England and Wales in the 1920s (e.g. #58 in 1924).
The first evident celebrity to be named Brenda was "bright young thing" extraordinaire Brenda Dean Paul whose "party girl" career afforded her a high society press profile from the mid-1920s: she was a member of the same social circle as writer Evelyn Waugh who gave the first name Brenda to a "bright young thing" who was a major character in Waugh's 1934 novel A Handful of Dust, a rare example of the name Brenda occurring in highbrow literature. From 1931 media attention on Brenda Dean Paul was focused on her substance addictions and legal woes: "in and out of rehab and court...she became a tabloid fixture that the public loved to hate": however the negative associations of such tabloid press headlines as "Brenda Jailed Again" had no evident effect on usage of the name Brenda in the British Isles of the 1930s, that decade affording the name Brenda its peak usage in England and Wales (e.g. #16 in 1934): still popular in the 1940s (e.g. #22 in 1944) the name Brenda had in 1954 dropped to #52 on the tally of the 100 most popular girls names for newborns in England and Wales with the name being absent on the respective tallies by 1964. In 2013 the name Brenda according to the ONS was given to a total of six newborn girls in England in 2013.
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