masc. proper name; third of the prophets in the Old Testament; via Latin and Greek, from Hebrew Amos, literally "borne (by God)."
stage name taken by exotic dancer Margaretha Gertruida Zelle (1876-1917), from Malay (Austronesian) mata "eye" + hari "day, dawn."
city in California, named c. 1866 for George Berkeley (1685-1753), Bishop of Cloyne, who denied the objective reality of the material world. The college there opened in 1873. The surname (also Barclay) is the birch-tree wood or clearing. The transuranic element berkelium (1950) is named for the laboratory there, where it was discovered. It does not occur naturally.
Whether they knew or not
Goldsmith and Burke, Swift and the Bishop of Cloyne
All hated Whiggery; but what is Whiggery?
A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind
That never looked out of the eye of a saint
Or out of drunkard's eye.
[Yeats, from "The Seven Sages"]
surname, from Medieval Latin Clarencia, name of dukedom created 1362 for Lionel, third son of Edward III, so called from the town of Clare, Suffolk, whose heiress Lionel married. Used as a masc. proper name from late 19c. As a type of four-wheeled closed carriage, named for the Duke of Clarence, later William IV.
"the heresy of the Docetae," who held that the body of Jesus was a phantom or of real but celestial substance, 1829, from Greek Doketai, name of the sect, literally "believers," from dokein "to seem, have the appearance of, think," from PIE *dok-eye-, suffixed (causative) form of root *dek- "to take, accept." Related: Docetic.
masc. proper name, Biblical third son of Adam and ancestor of all the surviving human race via Noah, literally "set, appointed," from Hebrew Sheth, from shith "to put, set." The Gnostic sect of Sethites (1765) flourished 2c. and believed Christ was a reappearance of Seth, whom they venerated as the first spiritual man.
line of Jewish princes who ruled in Judea, late 14c., from Late Latin Maccabæus, surname given to Judas, third son of Mattathias the Hasmonean, leader of the religious revolt against Antiochus IV, 175-166 B.C.E. Usually connected with Hebrew maqqabh "hammer," but Klein thinks it an inexact transliteration of Hebrew matzbi "general, commander of an army." Related: Maccabean.
cognomen of the mad, extravagant, and legendarily cruel third Roman emperor (12 C.E.-41 C.E.), born Gaius Caesar. The nickname is Latin, literally "little boot," given when he joined his father on military campaigns when still a toddler, in full, child-sized military gear; it is a diminutive of caliga "heavy military shoe," which is of unknown origin.
former duchy in central Germany, from Medieval Latin Suabia (German Schwaben), named for the Germanic tribe called by the Romans Suebi, said to be from Proto-Germanic *sweba, perhaps ultimately from PIE root *s(w)e-, pronoun of the third person and reflexive (referring back to the subject of a sentence), also used in forms denoting the speaker's social group, "(we our-)selves."
