Lily

The flower, and where the word came from

Lily is the name of the flower, and the flower's name is old. English has it from Latin lilium, and Latin from Greek leirion. The plant has been carrying meaning for a very long time: in Christian art the white lily is the flower of the Annunciation and a symbol of purity, which is why one species is called the Madonna lily.

The flower names English speakers use as given names — Lily, Rose, Violet, Daisy, Poppy — mostly arrived in the same wave, and they arrived as descriptions. A girl called Lily in 1870 was named after a plant, not after an abstraction.

Why it became a girl's name

Flower names for girls became fashionable in the English-speaking world during the nineteenth century, and Lily was one of the ones that stuck. It has a second route into the same territory: Lily has also been used as a shortening of Elizabeth, which is how it turns up in older records where no flower was intended.

Our own listing files it under girl names and tags the meaning as love, which is an association rather than a translation. The word means the flower. Everything else — purity, innocence, love — is symbolism that people have attached to the plant over two thousand years, and it is worth keeping the two apart.

The lily is genuinely dangerous, to cats

This deserves a paragraph on a page about the name, because most name sites leave it out. True lilies — the genus Lilium, which includes Easter lilies, Asiatic and Oriental lilies, Stargazer and tiger lilies — are severely toxic to cats. Every part of the plant is a risk, including the leaves, the stem, the flower, the pollen and the water in the vase. Ingestion causes vomiting, abdominal pain and dehydration and can progress to acute kidney failure, and the veterinary guidance is that any exposure is an emergency.

The distinction matters and is easy to lose: the danger is to cats. The same source does not describe dogs as at equivalent risk from Lilium, and this is a feline poisoning rather than a canine one. If there is a cat in the house, a dog called Lily is a name standing next to a plant you should not keep.

Lily as a dog name

LIL-ee. Two syllables, a clear l to open with and a long -ee to finish, which is about as easy as a name gets. The l is a quiet consonant and will not cut through wind, but the ending will, and the ending is the part that carries anyway.

The name is soft and slightly old-fashioned, and it belongs to the same family as Daisy, Rosie and Poppy. For the same reason it is extremely common, and a Lily at the park will almost certainly meet another one. If you want the sound without the crowd, Lila or Lilou keep most of it and lose the crowd.

See also: Daisy · Flora · Clover · Willow · Misty

Common questions