Enid (given name)

Julia Margaret Cameron, "Enid", 1874: portrait of the legendary figure as depicted in Tennyson
Gender	Feminine
Word/name	cognate with the Welsh word enaid meaning "soul, life" (earlier eneid, eneit)
Meaning	"purity" or "soul"
Related names	Énide (French)

Enid (/ˈiːnɪd/ EE-nid; Welsh pronunciation: [ˈɛnɨ̞d]) is a feminine given name, the origin of which is Middle Welsh eneit, meaning "purity", literally "soul" (from Proto-Celtic *ana-ti̯o-, compare Gaulish anatia "souls (?)" attested on the Larzac tablet, ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root *h₂enh₁- "to breathe, blow"; cf. the modern Welsh , "breath" or "wind").Enid was a character in Alfred Lord Tennyson's Arthurian epic Idylls of the King (1859) and its medieval Welsh source, the Mabinogi tale of Geraint and Enid; according to The Facts on File Dictionary of First Names (1983),

"Enid drifted into use after publication of [Tennyson's] poem, and did not become firmly established until the 1890s. At its most popular in Britain in the 1920s, then began to fade slowly. Always rare elsewhere. Helena Swan once remarked that it was the greatest possible compliment for a woman to be called ‘a second Enid’, since the original was the perfect example of spotless purity."