Juliet

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A feminine first name, famously borne by the young lover in Shakespeare's tragedy of star-crossed Verona ; the code word representing the letter J in the NATO phonetic alphabet
2. A woman's given name made famous by a Shakespearean heroine ; the military radio codeword standing for the letter J in spelling alphabets
3. Feminine personal name associated with a lovesick character from a famous Elizabethan play ; a spelling-alphabet code word assigned to the letter J

Etymology: Shakespeare's Juliet is so familiar that her name feels older than the play, but the name itself was a diminutive form before it was ever a heroine's. It is a diminutive of "Giulia", the Italian form of "Julia", which in turn was the feminine of "Iulius", the Roman family name (gens Iulia) that claimed descent from Iulus, the son of Aeneas. So the name carries a Roman aristocratic lineage, filtered through Italian affection, which shortened and softened it into something pet-like. The name reached English largely through its Italian and French forms, and it was the Italian setting of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" that made the name widely fashionable in the English-speaking world. The French form "Juliette" is a cognate, descending from the same Latin base, so the two languages share the name's roots while developing it along separate paths.