Gender Feminine
Meaning & History
The name of a character from two 15-part movie serials in the early 1940s: Jungle Girl (1941) and Perils of Nyoka (1942). The serials were based on the novel Jungle Girl (1932) by Edgar Rice Burroughs, in which the titular character was named Fou-tan. The meaning of the name is not uncertain, but it has been suggested that it was inspired by the word nyoka which means "snake" in multiple African languages including Swahili, Shona, Kikuyu and Tsonga.