ANGEL ROSARIO

Very common Spanish boy's name (pronounced with a hard g and the stress on the second syllable), a vernacular derivative (via Latin) of Greek angelos, which meant ‘messenger’ in classical Greek, but in New Testament Greek acquired the specialized sense ‘messenger of God’, i.e. an angel. It is common in the U.S. In Britain it is now almost exclusively a girl's name, but it was used occasionally as a boy's name from the 1400s, if not earlier. As such it is familiar as the name of Angel Clare, the chief male character in Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891).

Spanish and Portuguese: mostly from a short form of Spanish (del) Rosario, Portuguese (do) Rosá, from rosario ‘rosary’; or from the Marian name María del Rosario, given in particular to a girl who was born on the festival of Our Lady of the Rosary, celebrated on the first Sunday in October. The word derives from Late Latin rosarium ‘rose garden’, and was transferred to a set of devotions dedicated to the Virgin Mary as the result of the medieval symbolism which constantly compared her to a rose.