The Harry Potter books are a name lover’s dream, author J. K. Rowling being probably the most prolific and creative character namer since Charles Dickens. Her seven Harry Potter books have an enormous cast of magical wizards and wizards-in-training, witches, ghosts, Hogwarts School professors and students–most of them named with great gusto, humor, and a genius for witty wordplay and cleverly engineered misspellings, interweaving Greek and Latin roots with skill and panache. Like Dickens, Rowling takes delight in matching name to nature and employs symbolism as well, as for instance calling Harry’s good and pure mother Lily.
A favorite trick of hers is drawing characters’ names from the realm of astronomy, thus producing such celestial names as:
ANDROMEDA –a constellation in the Northern sky
BELLATRIX — a star in the constellation Orion
CASSIOPEIA — another constellation in the Northern sky
DRACO — a constellation known as Draco the Dragon
LUNA – the moon
POLLUX — one of the twin stars of Gemini
SCORPIUS – a constellation representing a scorpion
Last week we talked about the la-la part of oo-la-la names, but it seems that a large proportion of currently hot names have the cool oo sound as well. Maybe it’s because the names do share the sound with that c-word (not to mention oomph, and it’s also just a stone’s throw away from cute), but in any case, as namiacs who parse these trends down to a single syllable, we offer a list to prove our point.
