Diminutive of Ignatius, from Latin *ignis* meaning "fire," giving the sense of being lively or passionate.
Iggy began life as a nickname for Ignatius, a name of debated ancient origin. The Roman family name Egnatius may have Etruscan roots, but later generations inevitably associated it with the Latin 'ignis,' meaning fire — and the association proved too good to resist. Saint Ignatius of Antioch, one of the earliest Christian martyrs, bore the name in the first century CE; Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the sixteenth-century Basque priest who founded the Society of Jesus, gave it renewed prominence and intellectual gravity.
The Jesuits' tradition of rigorous scholarship attached a kind of burning intellectual intensity to the name. Iggy's journey from diminutive to independent identity accelerated spectacularly in 1969 when a Detroit rock musician named James Newell Osterberg Jr. adopted the stage name Iggy Pop.
His performances — frenetic, confrontational, physically extreme — embodied the fire etymology with literal fidelity. Iggy Pop became one of the most influential figures in the history of rock music, the 'Godfather of Punk,' and his name became synonymous with a particular kind of raw, uncompromised self-expression. More recently, Iggy Azalea brought the name into a new generation's vocabulary.
As a given name rather than a nickname, Iggy is warm, slightly irreverent, and carries genuine historical weight beneath its playful surface. It has the quality of names that seem casual but aren't: a Jesuit fire and a punk's disregard for convention make for an unexpectedly rich inheritance.