Lemuel

Lemuel comes from the Hebrew Lemu'el, meaning devoted to God or belonging to God, and belongs to a mysterious king in the Book of Proverbs whose mother taught him the qualities of wisdom and justice in one of the Bible's rare passages of maternal instruction. Jonathan Swift borrowed it for Lemuel Gulliver in 1726, giving the name a satirical and literary second life. It enjoyed modest Puritan use in colonial America and has since become quite rare, which preserves its gentle oddity. Three syllables with a liquid middle, nothing sharp. Lemuel feels quietly literary, slightly bookish, with an appealing old-soul cadence.