Larissa

Meaning of Larissa

Larissa—rendered luh-RISS-uh in contemporary English and luh-REE-suh in Russian—traces its lineage to the ancient Greek Λάρισα, the name of a nymph associated with the plain of Thessaly and, by extension, the city that still bears her appellation; through Byzantine and Slavic channels it entered the Eastern Christian calendar, where a fourth-century martyr secured its ecclesiastical legitimacy, before migrating westward into Anglophone usage during the nineteenth-century vogue for classical revivals. In the United States the name has maintained a modest but durable presence: first registering measurable use in the mid-twentieth century, rising methodically to a high-water mark in the late 1990s, and thereafter receding to its current ranking just beyond the eight-hundredth position—a pattern suggestive of steady familiarity without the volatility of trend-driven ephemera. Connotatively, Larissa evokes the cool clarity of Attic antiquity tempered by the grace notes of Russian literary heritage, offering parents a designation that is at once historically resonant, cross-cultural in reach, and phonetically limpid.