Sophia (given name)

A depiction of Saint Sophia and Her Three Daughters, Faith, Hope and Charity (icon of the Novgorod school, 16th century).

Sophia Loren in 1955

Sophia (also spelled Sofia, variant Sophie), is a feminine given name, from Greek Σοφία, Sophía, "Wisdom".

The given name is recorded beginning in the 4th century.^[1] It became very popular beginning in the later 1990s and became one of the most popularly given girls' names in the Western world during the 2010s.

Popularity

The name was comparatively common in continental Europe in the medieval and early modern period. It was popularized in Britain by the German House of Hanover in the 18th century. It was repeatedly popularised among the wider population, by the name of a character in the novel Tom Jones (1794) by Henry Fielding, in The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) by Oliver Goldsmith, and in the 1960s by Italian actress Sophia Loren (b. 1934).

Sophia was comparatively popular in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century; its use declined in the 1920s to 1950s; it became again moderately popular during the 1960s to 1980s.

During the 1990s to 2010s the popularity of the name rose dramatically in many countries throughout the western world. Suggested influences for this trend include Sofía Vergara and Sofia Coppola (popular from the late 1990s) and Sofia Hellqvist (popular from the 2000s).^[2] Sophia was the most popularly given girls' name in the United States during 2011–2013. The form Sofia was rarely given in the United States before the 1970s; it also steeply rose in popularity in the 1990s to 2000s and peaked at rank 12 in 2012.^[3]

When combined all spelling variants (Sophia, Sofia, Sophie, etc.) together, Sophia was the most popular name for 8 years in a row during 2000-2017 in the United States.^[4]

Sophie was the fifth most popular name for girls in Australia in 2013.^[5] The name had a similar rise in popularity in other countries, reaching rank 1 in the 2010s in Italy, Chile, Denmark, Finland,^[3] Russia^[6] and Estonia.^[7] and was in the top ten most popular girls' names in the Czech Republic, ^[8] in Poland (as Zofia),^[9] Spain, Switzerland^[3] Romania^[10] and Bulgaria.^[11]

Name variants

Greek Σοφία was adopted without significant phonological changes into numerous languages, as Sophia (German, and thence English) and Sofia (Romance languages, and thence also to Germanic languages and Finnish, etc.). The spelling Soffia is Icelandic and Welsh. Hungarian has Zsófia. Modern Spanish uses the acute diacritic, Sofía. South and East Slavic and Baltic languages have Sofiya (София, Софија, Sofija). West Slavic (Polish and Czech-Slovak) introduced a voiced sibilant, Zofia, Žofia, Žofie.

French has the (disyllabic) hypocoristic Sophie, which was also introduced in German, Dutch/Flemish, English and Scandinavian in the spelling Sofie. A Dutch hypocoristic is Sofieke. Russian has the hypocoristic Соня (Sonya), which in the late 19th century was introduced to Western languages, in the spellings Sonya, Sonia and Sonja, via characters with this name in the novels Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1866, English translation 1885) and War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1869, English translation 1886).

Turkish Safiye is from the unrelated Arabic Safiyya (صفية "pure").

People

Fictional characters

• Princess Sofia, from the Disney Junior television series Sofia the First
• Sophie Amundsen, main character from the novel Sophie's World
• Sofia Constantinas, from the comic Wonder Woman
• Sofia Curtis, from the TV series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
• Sofia Johnson, from film The Color Purple
• Sofia Dupre, a character on the American soap opera The Young and the Restless
• Sofia Lamb, from the video game BioShock 2
• Sofia Petrovna, a character from the novel of the same name
• Sofia Sartor from the video game Assassin's Creed: Revelations
• Sofia Serrano from the film Vanilla Sky
• Sofia Robbins Sloan Torres, a character from Grey's Anatomy
• Sophia, playable character from Fire Emblem: Fūin no Tsurugi
• Sophia Esteed, from the video game Star Ocean: Till the End of Time
• Sophia Forrester, from the animated TV series Last Exile
• Sophia Hapgood, from the video game Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
• Sophia Lopez, from the TV series Nip/Tuck
• Sophia Peletier, from the TV series and comic books The Walking Dead
• Sophia Petrillo, from the TV series The Golden Girls
• Sophia Marlowe, from the TV series "Girl Boss"
• Sophia Tutu, a character from the animated TV series The Raccoons
• Sophia Western, main heroine of the novel The History of Tom Jones
• Sophie, from the video game Tales of Graces
• Sophie Neveu Saint-Clair, character in Dan Brown's book The Da Vinci Code
• Sophie Zawistowska, the title character of the novel and movie Sophie's Choice
• Sophia, a fictional character from the video game Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box

See also

• Sophie (disambiguation)
• Sonia (name)
• SOFIA

References

External links

• NamepediA Blog - The Journey of the Name Sophia