History and variants
The Latin name Vivianus is recorded from the 1st century.[1] It is ultimately related to the adjective vivus "alive", but it is formed from the compound form vivi-[2] and the adjectival -ānus suffix used to form cognomina.
The latinate given name Vivianus was of limited popularity in the medieval period in reference to Saint Vivianus, a 5th-century bishop of Saintes; the feminine name was that of Saint Viviana (Bibiana), a 4th-century martyr whose veneration in Rome is ascertained for the 5th century.
In Arthurian legend, Vivian in its various spellings is one of the names of the Lady of the Lake.
The name was brought to England with the Norman invasion, and is occasionally recorded in England in the 12th and 13th centuries. The masculine given name appears with greater frequency in the early modern period. The spelling Vivian was historically used only as a masculine name, and is still used as such in the UK with this spelling, but in the 19th century was also given to girls and was a unisex name until the early part of the 20th century; since the mid 20th century, it has been almost exclusively given as a feminine name in the United States. Use of Vivian as a feminine name peaked in popularity in the United States in 1920 at rank 64, but declined in the second half of the 20th century, falling below rank 500 in the 1980s. Its popularity has again picked up somewhat since the 1990s, as of 2012 having attained rank 140.[3]
Variants of the feminine name include Viviana, Viviane, and Vivienne. The French feminine spelling Vivienne in the United States rose sharply in recent years from below rank 1,000 (no statistical record) to rank 322 in the period 2009–2012.[4] The Italian or Latin form Viviana has enjoyed some popularity since the 1990s, reaching rank 322 in 2000.[5] The spelling Vivien is the French masculine form, but in English speaking countries it has long been used as a feminine form, due to its appearance as the name of the Arthurian Lady of the Lake in Tennyson's Idylls of the King of 1859.[6] For the masculine name, the variant Vyvyan has sometimes been used, based on the Cornish surname itself derived from the given name. The intermediary form Vyvian is also occasionally found.
The Gaelic name Ninian has sometimes been identified as a corruption of Vivian, but it is now considered more likely derived from Welsh Nynniaw, which is itself of uncertain origin, but likely renders Nennius. Bébinn is an unrelated, genuinely Gaelic name which has on occasion been rendered as Vivian in English.
