I have more baby name books than I care to count, and strangely enough my purchase of them had absolutely nothing to do with naming babies. When I aspired to write for a living, I believed in the power of the name. Every one of my characters had to have a name that meant something specific, something to help characterize the person they were.

So it should come as no surprise that in my search for identity I’ve looked up my own name several hundred thousand times. Many books will tell you that April is derived from the Latin Aprilis, meaning “opening” or “to open” as in the opening of the earth for spring, and that is usually as far as they will go. A person can be open, true, but it’s hardly enough of a blueprint to govern my life.

Lucky for me, my name also happens to be a month, which broadens my list of potential research material, so I’ve whipped out John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins and read this:

April [14] Aprilis was the name given by the Romans to the fourth month of the year. It is thought that the word may be based on Apru, an Etruscan borrowing of Greek Aphro, a shortened version of Aphrodite, the name of the Greek goodess of love. In that case Aprilis would have signified for the Romans ‘the month of Venus.’ English acquired the word direct from Latin, but earlier, in the 13th century, it had borrowed the French version, avril; this survived, as averil, until the 15th century in England, and for longer in Scotland. The term April fool goes back at least to the late 17th century.
»Aphrodite

So there you have it. I, April, am somehow tied to Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. Of course, that means I’ll expect some kind of worship from you mortals.

If you leave your offerings at the temple, I’ll tell you what your name means.

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