JADE TAYLOR

From the name of the precious stone, a word that reached English from Spanish (piedra de) ijada, which literally means ‘(stone of the) bowels’. It was so called because it was believed to have the magical power of providing protection against disorders of the intestines. The vogue for this word as a given name developed later than that for other gemstone names, possibly because it sounds the same as the vocabulary word denoting a broken-down old horse or a nagging woman. It came to notice in the early 1970s when the daughter of the English rock star Mick Jagger was so named, peaking in popularity through the 1990s. In 2002 the name became famous as that of Jade Goody, a remarkably cheerful but ill-informed contestant on Channel 4's reality TV show Big Brother.

English and Scottish: occupational name for a tailor, from Old French tailleur (Late Latin taliator, from taliare ‘to cut’). The surname is extremely common in Britain and Ireland, and its numbers have been swelled by its adoption as an Americanized form of the numerous equivalent European names, most of which are also very common among Ashkenazic Jews, for example Schneider, Szabó, and Portnov.