Beryl

Meaning of Beryl

Beryl is a unisex given name derived from the Greek noun bērýllos, denoting the crystalline mineral beryl, which passed into Old French as beril and subsequently into English, where it is now phonetically rendered as BEHR-uhl (/ˈbɑrəl/), featuring a bisyllabic form with primary stress on the first syllable. Throughout the early to mid-twentieth century in the United States, the name attained modest yet consistent adoption—evidenced by its recurrent presence in state-level naming registers from the 1910s through the 1950s—before experiencing a decline in usage thereafter. From an onomastic perspective, Beryl is distinguished by its direct semantic link to gemological and mineralogical terminology, its associations with crystalline clarity and resilience, and its morphological neutrality that facilitates application across gender categories. Its sustained, though infrequent, occurrence in modern Anglo-American naming conventions reflects an enduring scholarly and cultural interest in designations drawn from the natural sciences, particularly the lexicon of gemology.