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bsimpson • yesterday at 7:36 PM • 4 replies • view on HN

Andrea (on-dre-ah vs and-ree-ah) is a true name collision.

Michele and Daniele look like misspellings of Michelle and Danielle though. I don't know any women named Daniele or men named Danielle.


Replies

adrian_b • yesterday at 11:59 PM

"Andrea" is at its origin a feminine Greek word, but because its meaning is "courage" or "virility", in many places it became a name given to males.

kergonath • yesterday at 11:43 PM

> I don't know any women named Daniele or men named Danielle.

I wouldn’t be surprise to meet a (female) Daniele. The second L is already dropped somewhat regularly in Michelle. Which is interesting because it came from the French, but since then the French spelling drifted to "Michèle" (and then more or less fell completely out of fashion, and then seemed to come back for a while). In any case, both are pronounced exactly the same way.

casta • yesterday at 7:42 PM

My name is Daniele (I'm from Italy), and I've been living in NY for a while. My real estate attorney name was Daniele as well (she's a woman,) it was extremely confusing at closing time.

Also, fun fact, I got invited to a ton Women in Tech stuff. I even got recruited to a company that was proud of having > 50% women in their teams. I assume that was because I was working on an OSS project (Chromium) and I had no avatar there.

Also, in the two FAANG companies I worked at I was added to women groups a few times.

thaumasiotes • yesterday at 9:24 PM

> Andrea (on-dre-ah vs and-ree-ah) is a true name collision.

What do you mean? The Italian male name Andrea and the English female name Andrea aren't unrelated names that happen to be spelled the same way. They are one and the same name, both derived from the Greek word for "man"; the Italian name has managed to remember that it's overtly masculine and the English name has forgotten this.

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