In Through the Looking Glass, Humpty Dumpty, among his various pronouncements to Alice, pontificates on the meanings of names. After describing the name Alice’ as ‘a stupid name enough’, Humpty Dumpty asks her what the name Alice means. Alice is doubtful: ‘Must a name mean something?’ And Humpty Dumpty retorts: ‘Of course it must ... My name means the shape I am – and a good handsome shape it is, too.’ The question of the meaning of Alice’s name is left unanswered in Lewis Carroll’s text, but it is answered in William Noble’s Names from Here and Far: The New Holland Dictionary of Names. Alice, we are told, is an English form of the name Adelaide, which in turn is a compound from the Germanic words athel, meaning ‘noble’, and Hilda, meaning ‘heroine’, or heid, meaning ‘kind’. Thus Alice means something like ‘nobly born’.

One might assume, then, that William Noble also comes from a long line of aristocrats. But not on your nelly! Is the nelly in this idiom a diminutive of Helen or Eleanor in the original rhyming slang not on your Nelly Duff: i.e. ‘not on your puff (of life)’? And does Duff keep us in England as a shortened form of the Derbyshire name Duffield, or does it takes us to Ireland, where the common surname Duffy derives from a Gaelic word meaning ‘dark’? You can find all of this information by chasing through the links in Names from Here and Far. As to noble, William Noble nobly points out that no aristocrat would be so vulgar as to take on a word of this kind as a family name. No, the nickname noble was applied to someone ‘who dressed and acted above his class’.