Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa
by thaumasiotes on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @02:47AM
(#50349229)
> It is the Italian name which has forgotten that originally it was a feminine word, not the English, which has preserved the original grammatical gender.
That's not really what I said. The name is a masculine name. You can name your son "virility" without problems. If you try to do that to your daughter, you're going to have problems. The grammatical gender of the word is a separate concern.
Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa
by jltsiren on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @02:53AM
(#50349255)
And virility literally means manliness or manhood, and by extension physical qualities ideally associated with men. Romans had another concept, virtue, for manly mental qualities. Ancient Greek "andreia" covered both aspects of manliness.
Andrea as a female name is similar to Carla or Caroline. Take a name that means something related to men (but no longer obviously so) and adjust it a bit to make it a female name. As a male name it just reflects changes in pronunciation over time.
They are directly derived from the feminine Greek word "andreia", meaning "courage" or "virility", which had been derived from "andros", as supposedly a quality typical for males.