Ostara

Popularity over time

Name story

Ostara is the name of the Germanic goddess of spring and the dawn, whose Proto-Germanic form *Austrō shares its root with the word for 'east' — the direction of the rising sun. She is the deity from whom, through the Old English Ēostre, the word Easter itself most likely derives, a linguistic inheritance that places her quietly inside the vocabulary of hundreds of millions of people who have never heard her name.

The 9th-century monk Bede is the earliest to record her in writing, noting that the spring month in the Anglo-Saxon calendar was called Ēosturmonath in her honor. Jacob Grimm, the great 19th-century mythographer, revived and elaborated on Ostara in his landmark Deutsche Mythologie (1835), associating her with hares, eggs, and the renewal of life — the very symbols that populate the modern spring holiday bearing her corrupted name. Neil Gaiman brought her to a new generation in his novel American Gods (2001), where she appears as a layered, melancholy figure robbed of her worship, and later in the television adaptation, sparking a wave of renewed cultural interest.

As a given name, Ostara has flourished in Pagan, Wiccan, and nature-spirituality communities since the 1990s and has since spread to parents drawn simply to its mythological depth and its resonance — the sound of spring itself, of thaw and opening light. It is a name that arrives with a season attached to it.