Name
The name Yorick has most often been interpreted as an attempt to render a Scandinavian forename: usually either "Erick" or "Jørg", a form of the name George. The name "Rorik" has also been suggested, since it appears in Saxo Grammaticus, one of Shakespeare's source texts, as the name of the queen's father. There has been no agreement about which name is most likely.
An alternative suggestion is that it may be derived from the Viking name of the city of York (Jórvík), a connection that was first made in 1866. More recently Gerald Kilroy has suggested that it is an anagram of the Greek word 'Kurios', which he takes to be a reference to the Catholic martyr Edmund Campion.
The name was used by Laurence Sterne in his comic novels Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey as the surname of one of the characters, a parson who is a humorous portrait of the author. Parson Yorick is supposed to be descended from Shakespeare's Yorick.
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Famous quotes containing the word name:
“What is it? a learned man
Could give it a clumsy name.
Let him name it who can,
The beauty would be the same.”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)
“Name any name and then remember everybody you ever knew who bore than name. Are they all alike. I think so.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)