Elyot

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A surname found in historical English records ; a variant spelling of a personal name such as Eliot or Elliot ; a term occasionally used in literature as a character's name
2. An old-fashioned family name in England ; an alternate form of a well-known given name ; sometimes appearing as a literary figure's title in works
3. A rare English last name encountered in archival texts ; a spelling variation of names like Eliot ; used sporadically for naming characters in historical or creative writings

Etymology: Elyot is a variant spelling of Eliot, the English form of the Hebrew name Elijah, which means roughly "my God is Yahweh" (from "Eli," meaning "my God," and a shortened form of "Yahweh"). The name reached England through the Old French "Elie" and later "Eliot," which were borrowed from the Greek Elias, a form of the Hebrew original. Spellings varied freely in the medieval and early modern periods, and surnames like Eliot and Elyot were often written interchangeably in parish records and legal documents. The most famous bearer of the spelling is Sir Thomas Elyot, a sixteenth-century English diplomat and humanist scholar. In 1531 he published "The Book Named the Governor," a treatise on educating the ideal ruler, which helped establish English as a language fit for serious learned writing. His own surname was spelled in several different ways by his contemporaries, so the variant preserved in his name is a reminder of how loosely such spellings were fixed at the time.