Charity

Popularity over time

Name story

Charity comes from the Latin "caritas," meaning Christian love — specifically the selfless, unconditional love of God for humanity and of humans for one another, as distinct from romantic love ("amor") or friendship ("amicitia"). It entered English through the King James Bible as the translation of the Greek word "agape" in Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, where the great apostle writes that of faith, hope, and charity, "the greatest of these is charity." That scriptural passage gave the name an immediate moral grandeur, and Puritan settlers in New England adopted it enthusiastically alongside other virtue names — Faith, Hope, Prudence, Patience — as a way of inscribing religious aspiration into daily life and identity.

Charity was among the most common female virtue names in seventeenth and eighteenth century Britain and colonial America, borne by women across every social class. It appears in literature as both a given name and an ideal: in Bunyan's *The Pilgrim's Progress*, Charity is one of the daughters of the Palace Beautiful who ministers to Christian on his journey. By the Victorian era, as "charity" in its common-noun sense became more associated with organized philanthropy and institutional relief of poverty, the name acquired a slightly different connotation — generous giving of means rather than of spirit — which caused it to fall somewhat out of fashion among upwardly mobile families sensitive to class associations.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Charity has experienced a quiet, steady revival, appreciated for its combination of antique beauty and explicit moral content. It remains more common in religious households and in the American South, where Puritan naming traditions left a particularly deep imprint. For parents choosing it today, Charity is often a deliberate statement: that love given freely, without expectation of return, is the highest value they can plant in a child's name.