From Latin 'Fortuna' meaning 'luck' or 'fate,' also the Roman goddess of fortune.
Fortune descends directly from the Roman goddess Fortuna, the divine personification of luck, fate, and prosperity, who presided over the capricious wheel that lifted men to greatness and tumbled them back down. The goddess's name came from *fors* (chance, luck), related to *ferre* (to bring). Her cult was one of the most popular in the Roman world, and her image — blindfolded, holding a rudder and a cornucopia — adorned temples, coins, and household shrines for centuries.
When Christianity spread through the empire, Fortuna was recast not as a goddess but as the hand of Providence, and her name followed, becoming a Christian given name throughout medieval Europe. In English, Fortune was used as a given name and surname from the medieval period onward, appearing in parish records across England and later in the American colonies. It sat comfortably alongside other virtue and abstract names like Prudence, Grace, Patience, and Mercy that Puritan and early Protestant naming culture embraced with enthusiasm.
Shakespeare used Fortune as a literary touchstone repeatedly — characters invoke her, curse her, and plead with her throughout the canon — which kept the concept vivid in the English-speaking imagination. Today Fortune occupies an interesting space: too unusual to feel common, too historically grounded to feel invented. It carries an old-world confidence, like a name a Victorian merchant family might have bestowed on a child born in prosperous times. Revived by parents drawn to word names with genuine classical weight, it joins Valor, Honor, and Story as part of a broader return to names that mean something tangible — and Fortune, after all, means something everyone hopes for.