PAMELA MILLER

Invented by the Elizabethan pastoral poet Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86), in whose verse it is stressed on the second syllable. There is no clue to the sources that influenced Sidney in this coinage. It was later taken up by Samuel Richardson for the name of the heroine of his novel Pamela (1740). In Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1742), which started out as a parody of Pamela, Fielding comments that the name is ‘very strange’.

English and Scottish: occupational name for a miller. The standard modern vocabulary word represents the northern Middle English term, an agent derivative of mille ‘mill’, reinforced by Old Norse mylnari (see Milner). In southern, western, and central England Millward (literally, ‘mill keeper’) was the usual term. The American surname has absorbed many cognate surnames from other European languages, for example French Meunier, Dumoulin, Demoulins, and Moulin; German Mueller; Dutch Molenaar; Italian Molinaro; Spanish Molinero; Hungarian Molnár; Slavic Mlinar, etc.