Wat

Historical scholarship

Passages quoted verbatim from public-domain reference works. They reflect the scholarship of their time, not current consensus, and may use obsolete spellings.

• 1884From the archives

  Wat— “powerful warrior”

  …This same Walther was said to have afterwards reigned thirty years in Aquitaine, and, no doubt, the name was already common there, when, about 990, it came to saintly glory, through a monastic saint of that dukedom, who, being followed by two others, caused it to be spread far and wide. Indeed, there are twenty-eight Walters in Domesday, and Cambrai made plentiful use of it in the same form, till, about 1300, the spelling was altered to the French Gautier. Walther von…

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  …This same Walther was said to have afterwards reigned thirty years in Aquitaine, and, no doubt, the name was already common there, when, about 990, it came to saintly glory, through a monastic saint of that dukedom, who, being followed by two others, caused it to be spread far and wide. Indeed, there are twenty-eight Walters in Domesday, and Cambrai made plentiful use of it in the same form, till, about 1300, the spelling was altered to the French Gautier. Walther von Vogelwied, the Minnesinger, who bequeathed a perpetual dole to the birds of the air at his tomb, well deserved that the memory of his name should be kept up in Germany, and it has always been very popular. Wat, as a contraction, is as old as Rufus’s time, and Water was in use, at least, in Shakespeare’s time, when he shows the prophecy of Suffolk’s death by water fulfilled by the name of his assassin.

  Yonge, History of Christian Names (1884), Part VI, Chapter VI (Descriptive Names), Section VI (Power) · Public domain (Project Gutenberg)