Cyprus is taken from the Mediterranean island name, ultimately from Greek geographic tradition.
Cyprus takes its name from one of the Mediterranean's most storied islands, and behind that island name lies an entire civilization's worth of meaning. The most widely accepted etymology traces the Greek Kypros to the Eteocypriot word for copper — the metal that the island exported so abundantly in antiquity that the Latin cuprum, and eventually the English word copper itself, derived from it. To name a child Cyprus is therefore to evoke not just a landscape of limestone mountains and turquoise sea, but an entire chapter of Bronze Age trade and metallurgical ingenuity.
Cyprus in mythology is the birthplace of Aphrodite, goddess of love, who was said to have risen from the sea foam just off its southern coast near what is now Paphos. The island's association with beauty, desire, and the divine feminine gave it a poetic luster that persisted through Roman times and into the Renaissance, when poets invoked 'the Cyprian' as a byword for the goddess herself. Shakespeare's Othello unfolds almost entirely on Cypriot soil, lending the island a dramatic, storm-crossed atmosphere in the literary imagination.
As a given name, Cyprus is modern and rare, emerging alongside a broader trend of place names — like Savannah, Florence, or Milan — used for children. It skews slightly masculine in current usage but sits comfortably in the growing category of gender-neutral geographic names. It carries a certain windswept grandeur: sun-bleached, ancient, and romantic, the kind of name that sounds like it was born on a clifftop overlooking a wine-dark sea.