UNA MARTIN

Anglicized form of Irish Úna. In Irish legend Úna is the mother of the hero Conn Cétchathach (Conn of the Hundred Battles). It was also the name of the beloved of the 17th-century poet Tomás Láidir Costello: banned by her parents from seeing him, Úna fell into a decline and died, leaving him to mourn her in his verse. The Anglicized form of the name is sometimes taken to be from the feminine of Latin unus ‘one’. It is the name used by Spenser for the lady of the Red Cross Knight in The Faerie Queene: he probably had Latin rather than Irish in mind, even though he worked in Ireland for a while. The Irish name has also been Anglicized as Unity, Juno, Winifred, and Agnes.

English, Scottish, Irish, French, Dutch, German, Czech, Slovak, Spanish (Martín), Italian (Venice), etc.: from a personal name (Latin Martinus, a derivative of Mars, genitive Martis, the Roman god of fertility and war, whose name may derive ultimately from a root mar ‘gleam’). This was borne by a famous 4th-century saint, Martin of Tours, and consequently became extremely popular throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. As a North American surname, this form has absorbed many cognates from other European forms.