Twenty Cornish names with documented meanings

Cornish is a Brythonic Celtic language, in the same branch as Welsh and Breton rather than Irish or Scottish Gaelic. It stopped being spoken as a community language in the eighteenth century and has been revived since the early twentieth. In April 2014 the UK government recognised Cornish people as a national minority under the Council of Europe's Framework Convention, the same status already held by the Scots, Welsh and Irish.

The counts below are from the ONS baby names datasets for England and Wales, published on 9 July 2026 and covering births registered in 2025. The ONS does not publish a Cornwall-only table, so these are national counts; for a name of this kind, most of those registrations will be in the south-west.

Name	Origin and meaning	Babies in England and Wales, 2025
Blejan	Cornish for "flower"	fewer than 3
Demelza	From a Cornish place name meaning "fort of Maeldaf"; used as a first name only since the mid-twentieth century	10
Elowen	Cornish for "elm tree"; a recently coined name	82, plus 126 spelled Elowyn
Eseld	Cornish form of Iseult	fewer than 3
Jenifer	Cornish and English variant of Jennifer	fewer than 3
Kerensa	Cornish for "love"; also spelled Karenza and Kerenza	fewer than 3
Mabyn	Possibly from Old Cornish mab, "son"; a sixth-century Cornish saint	fewer than 3
Meraud	Meaning uncertain, perhaps from Cornish mor, "sea"	fewer than 3
Merryn	Meaning unknown; an early Cornish saint, who was male	34
Morwenna	From Old Cornish moroin, "maiden, girl"; a sixth-century saint	11
Tamsin	Contracted form of Thomasina, traditionally used in Cornwall	7
Daveth	Cornish form of David	fewer than 3
Jago	Cornish form of Jacob	57
Jory	Cornish form of George	fewer than 3
Jowan	Cornish form of John	17
Margh	Cornish form of Mark	fewer than 3
Myghal	Cornish form of Michael	fewer than 3
Pasco	Cornish form of Pascal	fewer than 3
Piran	Possibly from Ciarán; the patron saint of Cornwall	3, plus 5 spelled Perran
Trystan	Welsh and Cornish spelling of Tristan, probably from the Pictish name Drustan	9

How to read this list

Nearly all of these are genuinely rare

The ONS suppresses any name given to fewer than three babies in England and Wales in the year, so "fewer than 3" is the most information the published data can give. The most used name here is Elowen, and even that is modest: 82 girls in 2025 against 56 in 2024, with a further 126 registered as Elowyn, a spelling that is now the more common of the two. Merryn went to 34 girls and Jago to 57 boys, down from 67 the year before. Demelza, Morwenna, Jowan, Tamsin and Trystan are all in single or low double figures, and ten of the twenty names here did not clear the ONS threshold at all. If you want a name that will be unusual in a British classroom without being unpronounceable, this is a rich seam.

Cornish forms of familiar names are the easy way in

Half of this list is not exotic at all. Jago is Jacob, Jowan is John, Jory is George, Daveth is David, Margh is Mark, Myghal is Michael and Pasco is Pascal. A child called Jago has a name that is short, spellable and unmistakably Cornish, and one that a grandparent expecting James will still recognise. That is a very different proposition from Meraud or Blejan, and it explains why Jago and Jowan are the two Cornish men's names with real numbers behind them.

Two of the best known are modern

Elowen appears to be a twentieth-century coinage from the Cornish word for elm, and Demelza was a place name until Winston Graham used it for a character in the Poldark novels; the television adaptation of the 1970s put it into general use. Neither is less Cornish for being recent, but it is worth knowing that they are not medieval survivals, because plenty of name sites imply otherwise.

Saints' names carry the older layer

Piran, Merryn, Mabyn and Morwenna are all names of early Cornish saints, and each is attached to a parish and a church in Cornwall. Piran is the patron saint of Cornwall and the origin of the county flag. Merryn is recorded as a man in the early sources, which is a good example of how unreliable gender assumptions become once you go back far enough.

What we have deliberately left out

Commercial baby-name sites publish long Cornish lists with confident glosses that no dictionary or scholarly source supports. We have not included a name here unless its origin is documented in an etymological reference that shows its sources, which is why several familiar entries are missing. Lowena, Kensa, Steren and Senara circulate widely as Cornish names meaning "joy", "first", "star" and a saint's name respectively; the first three are ordinary Cornish vocabulary words, but we could not verify a documented history of their use as personal names, so we have left them off rather than repeat an unsourced claim.

We have also not invented a pronunciation guide. Revived Cornish has more than one written standard and more than one pronunciation tradition, and a respelling that suited one would mislead about the others. If pronunciation matters to you, ask a Cornish language teacher or an organisation in Cornwall rather than trusting a phonetic key on a name site.

One last practical point. Several of these names are hard to spell from hearing and hard to say from reading, in both directions, for anyone outside Cornwall. That is not a reason to avoid them, but it is worth choosing with your eyes open, and it is the main reason parents who like the sound often land on Elowen or Jago rather than Myghal or Meraud.

Cornish Baby Names, With Meanings and Sources