Vanessa: the name a poet built for one woman
Before 1726, nobody was named Vanessa. It didn't drift down from Latin or the Bible. It was built, on purpose, by one man for one woman.
Jonathan Swift wrote a long poem, Cadenus and Vanessa, about Esther Vanhomrigh, a younger woman who loved him and whom he could not quite have. He welded her names together: the Van of Vanhomrigh, the Essa of Esther. That was what he called her. The poem sat unpublished for years; when it appeared in 1726, the made-up name appeared with it.
It didn't stay in the poem. Parents started using it. Then in 1807 the Danish entomologist Fabricius hung the same word on a genus of butterflies: the red admirals and painted ladies. A name Swift invented for one friend now sits on the wings of insects on every continent.
Esther Vanhomrigh died in 1723, three years before the poem that named her reached print. She never saw Vanessa become a name. Like the word a child made by accident for Wendy Darling, it went on without the person it was made for.
Sources: Wikipedia (Vanessa (name); Vanessa (butterfly)); Fabricius, 1807.
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