Odyssey comes from the Greek epic title associated with Odysseus, suggesting a long journey or adventurous quest.
Odyssey carries perhaps the most storied etymology in the entire Western naming tradition. It derives from Homer's Odysseia, the epic poem recounting the ten-year homeward voyage of Odysseus after the fall of Troy — a work composed in the eighth or ninth century BCE that has never stopped being read. The hero's own name, Odysseus (Latinized as Ulysses), likely derives from a Greek root meaning "pain," "hatred," or "to be wrathful," but the word odyssey long ago detached from the man and became a common noun: any long, arduous, transformative journey.
It was this semantic transformation that made Odyssey available as a name — you are not naming a child after a person but after a concept, after the journey itself. The word entered English as a common noun by the seventeenth century and began appearing as a given name in the twentieth, particularly in African-American communities with a tradition of aspirational, conceptual names — names like Justice, Destiny, and Journey that encode a hope or a worldview rather than honoring a specific ancestor. Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) embedded the word in the popular imagination as a symbol of humanity's greatest imaginative leaps, giving the name an additional layer of cosmic ambition.
As a given name Odyssey is still rare enough to stop a room, but its meaning is immediately understood by anyone — and that combination of singularity and legibility is precisely its appeal. Parents who choose it are often dreamers, readers, or travelers, people who want their child's very name to announce that life is an adventure worth taking seriously.