Achilles

What Does the Name Achilles Mean?

Achilles entered English through Latin Achilles, from the Greek Achilleus (Ἀχιλλεύς), the name of the Greek hero of the Trojan War. The explanation most often repeated reads the first part as achos, "grief, distress," and the second as laos, "the people," giving a sense such as "grief of the people." That reading suits the story in the Iliad, in which the hero's anger brings death and suffering to the Greek army, and Greek writers in antiquity already noticed the resemblance between the name and achos.

The derivation is not settled, however. The ending -illeus does not match laos cleanly, so the second element may belong to something else entirely. An ancient alternative, preserved in Greek commentary and repeated by later writers, explained the name as a- "not" plus cheilos "lip," meaning "without lips" - a physical guess that modern scholars do not accept as the real origin. Because the name does not divide into ordinary Greek words in a convincing way, some linguists treat Achilleus as a pre-Greek name from an older Aegean language, later fitted with -eus, a suffix common in Greek heroic names. "Grief of the people" is therefore a traditional interpretation, not a demonstrated fact.

Achilles Name History & Origins

The name is old in Greek. Tablets written in the Linear B script at Mycenaean palace sites, dating to roughly the 13th century BC, record a personal name usually transcribed a-ki-re-u, which many scholars read as a form of Achilleus. The individuals named on those tablets appear to be ordinary people, so the tablets indicate that the name was already in use before Homer but tell nothing about the later legend.

The name's fame comes from the Iliad, where Achilleus is the foremost Greek warrior at Troy. From Homer it passed into Greek tragedy and lyric poetry, and then into Latin literature, where Roman writers used Achilles; the hero is also the subject of Statius's unfinished epic Achilleid. The legend gave English two everyday expressions that have nothing to do with the name's etymology: an "Achilles' heel" for a fatal weakness, and the Achilles tendon, the cord at the back of the ankle.

In the Greek-speaking world the name continued in the form Achilleas (Αχιλλέας) and remains in use in Greece and Cyprus. In Western Europe it long served mainly as a classical and literary reference before being adopted as a given name in the 18th and 19th centuries, notably in France as Achille. A small number of Christian saints bore the name, among them Achilleus, a Roman martyr commemorated with Nereus. In English-speaking countries the name has stayed rare.