Kermit

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The green frog puppet character created by Jim Henson and famous from The Muppets ; a masculine first name of Scottish origin
2. A green puppet frog created by Jim Henson who stars in The Muppets ; a male given name of Scottish or Scandinavian origin
3. The well-known frog puppet from the Muppets television and film franchise ; a masculine personal name borne by various people

Etymology: Kermit is a Scottish and Manx surname, and it began as a fixed form of the Gaelic name meaning "son of Dermot." The Gaelic "Mac Diarmata" and Scots "McDiarmid" carry the same sense, and Kermode is a related variant that survives on the Isle of Man. The name travelled to America in the family line of Theodore Roosevelt, whose son Kermit Roosevelt was named after a Manx ancestor. That family connection is the route by which a Scottish surname became a first name in the United States. The name is now best known as the green frog of the Muppets, which Jim Henson created on Sesame Street. The Muppet took the name for its own reasons, and the frog's fame has since outweighed the surname's older life. The word also reached computing, where a file-transfer protocol was named after the character. Its later expansion, "KL10 Error-Free Reciprocal Microprocessor Interchange over TTY," was devised afterward to justify the name, so the acronym followed the name rather than producing it.