A female name. apparently invented by Sir Philip Sidney as the name of a character in his Arcadia (1590), and pronounced Pamēla. Richardson adopted it for the heroine of his first novel Pamela (1740), and the great vogue of that book led to its being sometimes used as a christian name. It is found in New England in 1812. Charlotte Mary Yonge, History of ChristianNames, 2 vols. 1863. Revised ed. 1884 says: ‘still not uncommon among the lower classes.’ A writer in Notes and Queries 1904 mentions it as an unusual name. Within the present century it has become rather fashionable. There seems to have been some doubt as to its pronunciation in the 18th C. Fielding, in Joseph Andrews, wrote: ‘She told me that they had a daughter of a very strange name, Pamĕla or Pamēla; some pronounce it one way, and some the other.’ It is now always pronounced Pámĕla.

Adopted by Richardson, for his Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, 1741, from Sidney’s Arcadia. In Richardson, as now, it was Pámela, but in Sidney it was Paméla (i. e. Pa-mél-a in contrast to Pám-e-la) and probably derived from Greek παν μέλι, (pan meli,)‘all honey,’i. e. ‘all sweetness.’ From being lower class, as it still was, in the main, as late as the 1880’s, it has become fashionable among the upper classes once more.

A female name. It would seem that the Pamela of Pope in his Epistle IV. to Miss Blount, with the Works of Voiture, in 1717, is a character totally distinct from the Pamela of Richardson. Mr. J. T. Buckston says Horace Walpole writes, 2nd June, 1759, ‘Loo is mounted to its zenith; the parties last till one and two in the morning. We played at Lady Hertford’s last week, the last night of the lying-in, till deep into Sunday morning, after she and her lord were retired. It is now adjourned to Mrs. Fitzroy’s, whose child the town calls Pam-ela.’ Now, if the pronunciation had been Pamela, the point of the joke would have been missed, for it alludes to the knave card called pam in the game of loo, referred to in the beginning of the letter, and Fielding’s Joseph Andrews is intended as a parody on Richardson’s heroine. Both names are Greek; Pope’s means ‘all cheeks and breasts,’ and Richardson’s ‘tuneful.’ The first name therefore is from παν all, and μηλον an apple, or any fruit resembling it—hence the cheeks and breasts of females; and the latter from παν and μελος, a song, melody. Conf. N. Q. 2nd S. ix. 305,394. The nickname is Pam.

A Teutonic name, meaning: Gift of the elf, suggesting inborn intellect.