Our reader Charlotte, who blogs at To Harriet Louise, commented thusly on the Caroline/Charlotte post: “This comment about Clare/Caroline made me smile because I’ve started reading Lives of the Saints, and just today I was thinking, “I think the only way I’d be able to use some of these names is if I used some of the same letters or just scrambled them around!””

And I said: “Oh do share! What were some of your ideas?”

And she went ahead and wrote a whole post! Rethinking Saints’ Names. Charlotte’s got a lot of great ideas for names like Aelred and Porphyry — !! I think her approach is a great one for dealing with those kinds of names — I just can’t see a little Porphyry today, great as the saint may be. And when the intention is to honor the saint, and to call him or her to mind in the saying of one’s child’s name, I really think this idea is totally legitimate.

Have any of you given your child a name in honor of a particular saint, but the name you chose wasn’t the same as the saint’s name, and wasn’t a variant, but was something more like what we’re talking about here — using sounds or letters from the name, or a portion of the name? (I know one of you honored St. Polycarp with a little Polly, which is just like voila! So great!)