A variant of Jemima, from Hebrew meaning dove.
Jemimah is one of the oldest attested feminine names in the Hebrew Bible, appearing in the Book of Job as the name of Job's eldest daughter, born to him after his restoration following devastating loss. The name is generally translated as 'dove' — yemimah in Hebrew — though some scholars connect it to an Arabic root meaning 'bright as day' or associate it with the Pleiades star cluster, known in Arabic as Al-Thurayya. That Job bestowed this tender, luminous name on a daughter born from suffering gives Jemimah a resonance of renewal and beauty reclaimed from grief.
The name was embraced by Puritan colonists in seventeenth-century England and New England, who favored Old Testament names for their daughters alongside the more common biblical selections. It appears in colonial church records and remained in modest circulation through the nineteenth century in Britain and America. The name is perhaps most familiar today through Beatrix Potter's 1908 tale Jemima Puddle-Duck, whose well-meaning but naive duck heroine gave the name an endearing, bucolic association in English children's culture — somewhat at odds with its ancient solemnity.
Jemimah (with the final h) is the more traditional Hebrew-faithful spelling, distinguishing it from Jemima and lending it a slightly more scholarly, deliberate feel. In the twenty-first century it has attracted parents drawn to genuinely antique names that predate the Puritan era — names with biblical depth and linguistic strangeness, unspoiled by overuse. It sits in the same revival conversation as Tabitha, Dinah, and Kezia — Job's three daughters, all of whom have found quiet modern champions.