Vanessa.
A female given name originating as a coinage.
Meaning & usage
A female given name originating as a coinage.
Where this word comes from
Coined by Jonathan Swift in the 18th century as a pseudonym for a lady friend named Esther Vanhomrigh (or Van Homrigh), an Irish woman of Dutch descent, by taking the Dutch preposition van from her surname and adding -essa (perhaps influenced by the first syllable of Esther).
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.