Amity comes from Latin amicitia, meaning friendship, harmony, and goodwill.
Amity belongs to the tradition of English virtue names — words pressed directly into service as given names to express a parent's deepest hopes for their child's character and relationships. The word derives from the Old French amitié and before that from the Latin amicitas, meaning "friendship," which in turn traces to amicus, "friend," and ultimately to the Proto-Indo-European root for love. It is a name that wears its heart plainly on its sleeve.
Virtue names flourished among Puritan settlers of colonial New England, and Amity, though less common than Patience or Prudence, was used in early American communities. The town of Amity in New York lent the concept a geographical identity, later made darkly famous — in a twist of irony given the name's peaceful meaning — when it became the fictional "Amity Island" in Peter Benchley's 1974 novel Jaws and the Steven Spielberg film that followed, one of the defining pop-culture events of the 1970s. The name carries that peculiar shadow even as its original meaning remains entirely luminous.
In the twenty-first century Amity has been rediscovered as part of a wider revival of Quaker and Puritan virtue names — Verity, Honor, True, and their kin finding new favor among parents drawn to names with clear moral intention. Amity stands out for its musicality: three open syllables with a gentle stress pattern that makes it feel both archaic and modern. It is a name that declares a vision of the world as a place where goodwill between people is possible and worth naming.