Gender: Feminine
Usage: English, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Italian, French, Polish, Finnish, Hungarian, Slovak, Slovene, Germanic [1]
Pronounced: IE-də(English) EE-da(German, Dutch, Italian, Polish) EE-dah(Swedish, Norwegian, Danish) EE-daw(Hungarian)
Derived from the Germanic element
id possibly meaning
"work, labour" (Proto-Germanic *
idiz). The
Normans brought this name to England, though it eventually died out there in the Middle Ages. It was strongly revived in the 19th century, in part due to the heroine in Alfred Tennyson's poem
The Princess (1847), which was later adapted into the play
Princess Ida (1884) by Gilbert and Sullivan.
Though the etymology is unrelated, this is the name of a mountain on the island of Crete where, according to Greek myth, the god Zeus was born.