Yenta

Yenta or Yente (Yiddish: יענטע‎) is a Yiddish women's given name. It is a variant form of the name Yentl, which ultimately is thought to be derived from the Italian word gentile, meaning 'noble' or 'refined'.[1][2] The name has entered Yinglish—i.e., become a Yiddish loanword in Jewish varieties of English—as a word referring to a woman who is a gossip or a busybody.

The use of yenta as a word for 'busybody' originated in the age of Yiddish theater. In the 1920s and 1930s the humorist Jacob Adler, writing under the pen name B. Kovner for The Jewish Daily Forward, wrote a series of comic sketches featuring the character Yente Telebende, a henpecking wife. The popularity of the character led to the name developing its colloquial sense of 'a gossip'.[1]

There is a mistaken belief that the word for a Jewish matchmaker is yenta or yente. In reality a Jewish matchmaker is called a shadchan (שדכן). The origin of this error is the 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof, in which a character named Yente serves as the matchmaker for the village of Anatevka.[3]

The name has also been used for:

  • The Linux CardBus controller, which brings together Cardbus cards with the rest of the computer
  • The name of a highly available key-value store for Perl[4]

See also

References
  1. https://forward.com/sisterhood/171019/yentas-real-yiddish-history/
  2. https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=yenta
  3. Joffe-Walt, Chana (June 13, 2012). "What's a Yenta?". NPR.org. Retrieved October 7, 2019.
  4. http://blogs.perl.org/users/jaw/2011/01/yenta---a-highly-available-key-value-store.html
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