ESTHER ALEXANDER

Biblical name, borne by a Jewish captive who became the wife of the Persian king Ahasuerus. Her Hebrew name was Hadassah ‘myrtle’, and the form Esther is said to be a Persian translation of this, although others derive it from Persian stara ‘star’. It may also be a Hebrew form of the name of the Persian goddess Ishtar. According to the book of the Bible that bears her name, Esther managed, by her perception and persuasion, to save large numbers of the Jews from the evil machinations of the royal counsellor Haman. See also Hester.

Scottish, English, German, Dutch; also found in many other cultures: from the personal name Alexander, classical Greek Alexandros, which probably originally meant ‘repulser of men (i.e. of the enemy)’, from alexein ‘to repel’ + andros, genitive of anēr ‘man’. Its popularity in the Middle Ages was due mainly to the Macedonian conqueror, Alexander the Great (356–323 BC)—or rather to the hero of the mythical versions of his exploits that gained currency in the so-called Alexander Romances. The name was also borne by various early Christian saints, including a patriarch of Alexandria (AD c.250–326), whose main achievement was condemning the Arian heresy. The Gaelic form of the personal name is Alasdair, which has given rise to a number of Scottish and Irish patronymic surnames, for example Mc Allister. Alexander is a common forename in Scotland, often representing an Anglicized form of the Gaelic name. In North America the form Alexander has absorbed many cases of cognate names from other languages, for example Spanish Alejandro, Italian Alessandro, Greek Alexandropoulos, Russian Aleksandr, etc. (For forms, see Hanks and Hodges 1988.) It has also been adopted as a Jewish name.