A female name. (French Dorothée, German Dorothea, Italian Spanish Dorotea); appears to be an arbitrary inversion of the name Θεοδώρα, ‘gift of God’, which like the m. Θεοδώρος, was apparently a christian coinage. The legend of St Dorothea, a 3rd-C Cappadocian martyr, is not found very early, and the name is not found in use in England until about the middle of the 16th C when it was already abbreviated to Doll; it was very common in the later part of the 16th C and throughout the 17th C, often in the forms Doll, Dolly or Dorat, Dorate. It went out of fashion in the first half of the 18th C, came back c. 1750-1800, and then disappeared again until about 1880. The use of doll for a child’s plaything is first recorded in 1700 (see Oxford English Dictionary s.v), about the time when the christian name went out of fashion. Like Jill, Parnell, Nan, and other popular names, Doll came to be used as a generic name for a loose woman (cf. Shakespeare’s Doll Tearsheet and Ben Jonson’s Doll Common), which probably accounts for its temporary disappearance. Dorothy has been the usual form of the name in England, but Dorothea was sometimes used in the 19th C (e.g. Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch). Besides Doll and Dolly, the diminutives Dot and Dodo are used. Dora, now an independent name, came into use at the beginning of the 19th C, and probably represents the German Dore. Dora Wordsworth (1804-47), the d. of the poet, is an early example.

Literally, in Greek, ‘a gift (doron) of God (Theos)’: cf., therefore, Dora and Tudor, qq. v., and see especially Theodore. Of this widespread European name, the German and Portuguese form is the same as the English (though the more English ‘shape’ is Dorothy), the French Dorothée, the Italian and Spanish Dorotea, the Polish Dorota. Under Hanoverian rule, Dorothea and Dorothy fell into disfavour, but by 1880 it was, as it still is, fashionable with all classes. (Yonge.)