A virtue name taken directly from the English word honor or moral esteem.
Honour is an English virtue name drawn directly from the Latin *honor*, meaning esteem, dignity, and moral integrity. It entered the English-speaking world through the Norman French *onor* after the Conquest of 1066, and by the medieval period it had become both a quality to aspire to and a name bestowed on daughters as a kind of moral bequest. The Puritans were particularly fond of virtue names, and Honour sat comfortably alongside Faith, Hope, and Prudence in the naming registers of seventeenth-century England and colonial America.
The name carries a distinguished literary pedigree. Henry Fielding gave it to the warm, loyal maidservant Honour in *Tom Jones* (1749), using the irony of the name to comic effect — she is devoted and good-hearted but hardly refined. More seriously, the concept of personal honour animated countless Romantic and Victorian heroines, even if the name itself fell out of fashion during the twentieth century as virtue names came to seem overly earnest.
In contemporary usage, Honour (and its American spelling Honor) has experienced a quiet revival, buoyed by a renewed appetite for old-fashioned English names with substance. It resonates as a name that feels both timeless and slightly daring — uncommon enough to stand out, yet rooted in a tradition stretching back nearly a millennium. The British spelling with the 'u' lends it an added layer of vintage character.