In England, this Latin form has been used alongside the vernacular forms Ann and Anne since the late Middle Ages. Anna is currently the most common of these spellings in all English-speaking countries (since the 1970s), however the biblical form Hannah is presently more popular than all three.
The name was borne by several Russian royals, including an 18th-century empress of Russia. It is also the name of the main character in Leo Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina (1877), about a married aristocrat who begins an ultimately tragic relationship with Count Vronsky.
The name was borne by a 17th-century English queen and also by the second wife of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn (the mother of Queen Elizabeth I), who was eventually beheaded in the Tower of London. Another notable bearer was the German-Jewish diarist Anne (Annelies) Frank, a young victim of the Holocaust in 1945. This is also the name of the heroine in the 1908 novel Anne of Green Gables by Canadian author L. M. Montgomery.
One theory derives Canna from the tropical flower of the same name, placing Canna among the many Victorian flower names. If that is true - and in some cases it certainly is -, then the roots of this name lie with Greek kanna "reed".
Another theory, however, considers Canna a borrowing of the name of the Scottish island Canna (Canaigh in Gaelic). The meaning of Canaigh is unclear; some scholars argue that it might be related to an Irish Gaelic word for "wolf-pup", while another group of academics derive the name from a Scottish Gaelic word for "porpoise" and yet another theory believes that, thanks to the island's shape, Canaigh might be related to an Old Norse word for "knee".
The spelling was later altered to Cordelia when Geoffrey's story was adapted by others, including Edmund Spenser in his poem The Faerie Queene (1590) and Shakespeare in his tragedy King Lear (1606).
The most notable bearer of the name was Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid Persian Empire in the 6th century BC. He is famous in the Old Testament for freeing the captive Jews and allowing them to return to Israel after his conquest of Babylon. As an English name, it first came into use among the Puritans after the Protestant Reformation.
In England, it began to be used as a given name after the Protestant Reformation. It was moderately common in the 19th century. It began to rise in popularity again in the late 1980s, probably helped along by characters on the American television shows Friends (1994-2004) and Charmed (1998-2006). It is currently much more common in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand than the United States.
A moon of Saturn bears this name, in honour of the Titan.
This was the name of a constellation: it was included among the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd century astronomer Ptolemy, and it remains one of the 88 modern constellations
Sagitta Alter is a Swedish, former tour guide who was the partner of famous Italian actor Gigi Proietti since 1962 until his death in 2020.
As an English name it was not used until after the Protestant Reformation. It was utilized by George Eliot for the title character in her novel Silas Marner (1861).
This was the name of the first English baby born in the New World: Virginia Dare in 1587 on Roanoke Island. Perhaps because of this, the name has generally been more popular in America than elsewhere in the English-speaking world, though in both Britain and America it was not often used until the 19th century. The baby was named after the Colony of Virginia, which was itself named for Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen. A more recent bearer was the English novelist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941).