Nordic Names Blog - New Icelandic Names 2020-01

25 January 2020
Welcome to our first 'real' blog article! The blog articles are meant to give you some deeper information than just the short facts in the Blog. We hope that you will enjoy them!

In January 2020, ten names were submitted to the Icelandic naming committee for approval. Six of them were approved and four rejected:

Female Names

• Bened: The applicant wanted to honour a grandmother named Benedikta but as the form Bened is unknown in Iceland and does not seem to fit the Icelandic language very well, the name was rejected. The applicant was allowed to use it as a middle name, though!
• Hafalda: This name had been used a couple of times before already. It is a combination of HAF and ALDA which have both been used as name elements before. The name was approved.
• Hannalísa: Quite obviously, this is a combination of HANN and LIS. Those kind of combinations of new name elements are quite common in the other Nordic countries but only a very few exceptions are known in Iceland, e.g. Annalísa. Hannalísa was rejected.
• Hrafnsunna: This new combination of the traditional Nordic name elements HRAFN and SUNN was approved. This is the first time we have heard about SUNN used as a last name element, though!

Male Names

• Birmir: This name looks very Icelandic as it reminds you of other Icelandic names like Birnir and Brimir and was approved without any problems. We are not sure about its meaning (our guess is that it is a variant form of one of the above mentioned names - if you happen to know more about it, please let us know!
• Ivar: This name has been approved as a variant spelling of Ívar.
• Lúsífer: This name has been rejected. In Iceland, Lúsífer is another name for the devil, so the names committee did not find it appropriate as a given name. Other spellings Lucifer and Lusifer had been rejected earlier as well.
• River: This English vocabulary name was approved. The name looks quite Icelandic with its '-ver'-ending, so there was no objection to accept it as a given name.
• Theó: This name was rejected due to the spelling 'Th' at the beginning. A t-sound has to be written 't' in Icelandic and a th-sound 'þ'. Only a very few exceptions are accepted if the applicant can prove a traditional usage of the name in Iceland, e.g. Theódór and Thomas.
• Ullur: Although a very new name, this one was approved without any problems as it is the natural younger form of the Old Norse name Ullr.

See also

For more information and new Icelandic names of other months see Icelandic Approved Names.