Beatrice is a female name, originally from
Italian, meaning "blessed woman." It is pronounced
bay-a'-tree-chay in Italian and
bee'-a-tris in
English. The name originally came from the late
Latin name "
Beatrix" (made famous by early Christian martyr
Saint Beatrix), which itself was a bastardized fusion of the Latin terms
viatrix, "female traveller," and
beatus, "blessed."
The most famous Beatrice, after whom all later Beatrices are named, was Dante's great love and muse Beatrice Portinari. Other notable Beatrices include:
- Sixteenth century Italian tragic heroine Beatrice Cenci, imprisoned by her own father and then beheaded for complicity in his murder, later immortalized in prose and verse.
- Beatrice, the sharp-witted antagonist to Benedick in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing.
- Princess Beatrice, one of Queen Victoria's daughters.
- English socialist, economist, and reformer Beatrice Webb.
- Beatrice, the all-female Hungarian rock band.
- American actress Beatrice Arthur, who starred in the popular 1980s TV show Golden Girls.
- Beatrice, Lemony Snicket's lost love, who once wrote a 200-page book explaining why it was impossible for her to marry him.
- Princess Beatrice of York, teenaged granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth II and currently fifth in the line of succession to the British crown.
- Beatrice, Nebraska, and its most famous offspring, Beatrice Foods, which was founded there in 1894, and was at one time the largest black-owned corporation in the United States with annual sales of $12 billion in the 1980s before falling prey to the leveraged buyout craze and being sold off piece by piece to other corporations, most notably ConAgra.