Comments (Meaning / History Only)
We named our first daughter Verena after meeting my wife's 2nd cousin of the same name who lived in Posciavo, a town in the Italian Swiss canton of Ticino. I think the Roman derivation is very likely but also love the connection with Saint Verena from Egypt. Of course, living in Canada has resulted in such nicknames as Vee and even Vern. It's all good stuff and both our Verenas are lovely people which is the most important thing, eh?
1
1
The Coptic Encyclopedia, a scholarly work, says this about the possible origins of the name Verena: Verena could be identified as the popular Coptic short form of the Ptolemaic Berenice. The Copts omitted the Greek suffixes ioc and ic and replaced them with e or a (according to Heuser); and the letter b in Coptic reads v when followed by a vowel. The name Verena could also be of ancient Egyptian origin, a compound of the Coptic and ancient Egyptian words vre ("seed") and ne ("town or the town," Thebes), that is, Seed of Thebes. [noted -ed]
3
3
Could also be related to the Latin word for green.
2
2
According to firstname.de, Verena is derived from latin meaning "the shy one".
-3
-3
Shy in Latin would be 'vercunda'; vercundus is the masculine version. But not 'Verena' to the best of my knowledge. Could be a Latinised version of an Egyptian name, perhaps.
2
2
Comments are left by users of this website. They are not checked for accuracy.
I get this impression from the meaning and history listed for the name Veremund, which is hypothesized to be a Latinized form of the Ancient Germanic name Waramunt.
So War -> Var has happened before.
As far as I know, -ena is a variant of -ina, the Latin form of -ine, a Greek suffix used to create feminine forms of male names.
Maybe it was a possible name that was never used with this meaning but it makes sense to me.