Why do Hogwarts teachers have such strange names?

Question

Look at the first names of the Hogwarts staff we know of:

Albus, Minerva, Severus, Filius, Remus, Pomona, Quirinus, Gilderoy, (Argus), ...

Most of these sound like ancient Roman or Greek names. Compare with the names of students:

Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ginny, Fred, George, Neville, Seamus, Dean, Luna, Vincent, Cedric, Ernie, Pansy, Millicent, Hannah, Percy, ...

All of these are perfectly ordinary modern English names. Even the names of adults who aren't Hogwarts teachers:

Molly, Arthur, Cornelius, Amos, Tom, James, Lily, Peter, ...

A couple of these sound quite old-fashioned but still plausible as modern English names.

Why do Hogwarts professors have such archaic names while other people don't?

Answer 1

Keep in mind there's some sampling bias here. The three main characters are all in Gryffindor, and consequently the vast majority of children introduced in the books, and given enough screen/page time that you remember them are Gryffindors.

So there are some reasons why teachers are more likely to have unusual names.

1) The old families will give old names like Draco. The old families will end up in Slytherin more often, so you are less likely as the reader to find out their first name.

2) In the wizarding world, like here, it's not what you know, it's who you know. Old families are more likely to become Hogwarts teachers

3) Muggleborns are more likely to get on first name basis with the reader, being less likely to be in Slytherin.

4) Teachers are older than the students, considering a lifespan of ~150 years, quite a bit older. Names change over time, and likely this is Muggle culture slowly bleeding through to the magical world. In Harry Potter, how old will a wizard live to be on average?

Answer 2

Out of universe, JKR quite obviously wanted to show their personalities.

• Albus is the Latin word for white, whose defining visual trait is his white hair and beard
• Severus coming from severe, he's very severe and strict. As Null points out in the comments, there is also a strong parallel with the Roman emperor Severus
• Minerva was the Roman goddess of wisdom, she's an extremely wise woman
• Filius is the Latin word for son, my interpretation of this is simply that Flitwick is described as being a very small man
• Remus is one of the founders of Rome, who was raised by a wolf, demonstrating his condition
• Pomona was the Roman goddess of fruitful abundance, suiting her post as herbology teacher
• Quirinus was another name for Janus, the Roman god of two faces (no need to explain that freaky little connection - thank you Alarion for this contribution). It's also a Latin adjective meaning wielder of the spear, as he is the defense against the dark arts teacher
• Gilderoy was the name of two different highway men who were both described as being very handsome, which JKR found in a book (Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable). Gilded is also a good connection to this name, a gold plating or a front, which is Lockhart all over (thank you again Alarion for this contribution also)
• Argus comes from Greek myth, Argos was a watchman with hundreds of eyes (much like Filch and his cat).

As you can see from the books, these names are all very linked to the characters' personalities.

As for an in-universe answer, the students are much younger than almost all of the professors at Hogwarts, who are mostly at least 2 (maybe even 3) generations older than the students. This archaic use of names can simply be down to this generation gap.

Answer 3

Name choices in wizarding families will be different from non-wizarding ones. In addition, names go in and out of fashion, and we can expect different naming trends in different generations. Bear in mind that teachers such as Dumbledore are at least a generation older than Harry's parents.

There also appears to be some variation between wizarding families. Arthur Weasley is fascinated by Muggles, so it is not too surprising that he gave his children plain Muggleish names. By contrast, the Blacks (Sirius, Bellatrix, Phineas) and Malfoys (Draco, Lucius) go in for more archaic and wizardly sounding names.

Finally, the names used by some of these teachers may not be the ones they were born with. (Although Gilderoy Lockhart's name is genuine; see comments.)

These factors together may help explain the unusual names of Hogwarts teachers.

Answer 4

This is a combination of generational shifts in naming fashions, and you picking and choosing your evidence. :)

In the generations that are older than Harry, there are lots of names that don't occur, or are very rare, in the muggle population:

Sirius, Bellatrix, Andromeda, Rodolphus, Xenophilius, Bathilda, Regulus, Mafalda, Bartemius, Mundungus, Marvolo, Merope, Morfin...

Not a Hogwarts professor in the bunch¹. Even in Harry's own generation, there are some unusual-for-muggles names: when's the last time you met someone named Nymphadora? Or Lavender, Luna, or Draco? And neither Ginny's full name, Ginevra, nor Hermione, are what you'd call run-of-the-mill.

In the other direction, not all Hogwarts professors have unusual names. The librarian is Irma - old-fashioned, perhaps, but totally mundane. The Muggle Studies professor's first name is Charity, which spiked in popularity in 1970, and hasn't completely tapered off yet. There's a substitute teacher named Wilhelmina, which as a baby name would cause my name-geek sister and her like-minded friends to go into ecstasies of adoration. And while calling a divination professor Sybill is almost too apt, it's still a perfectly normal name (albeit it's usually spelled Sybil).

_{¹ OK, OK, so Barty Crouch Jr. technically taught for a full year before being caught, but that wasn't under his own name.}

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To try to put numbers behind my opinions, I went through Wikipedia's list of Harry Potter characters and categorized each name as "mundane" or "strange/unique", and then counted how many of each belonged to Harry's generation (roughly) vs. an older generation, and how many of the older generation were Hogwarts professors.

Age group      Total    Mundane   Strange
Kids/teens        54    43 (80%)  11 (20%)
Non-professors    72    26 (36%)  46 (64%)
Professors        28     9 (32%)  19 (68%)
All adults       100    35 (35%)  65 (65%)

The proportion of strange/unique names among Hogwarts professors is slightly higher than in the adult population as a whole, but I wouldn't call it a significant difference.

(My categorization wasn't based on anything other than my knee-jerk reactions to each name, so take all this with a huge grain of salt. Also, note that I only included names of human beings — sorry, Dobby and Griphook —, and excluded muggles like the Dursleys — their naming practices are hardly indicative of wizarding-world practices, after all. However, I included muggle-born wizards, since I figured they'd be equally distributed in all of the groups, so they probably wouldn't skew the results in any particular direction.)

Answer 5

A selection of British muggles grandparents names:

• Margaret, Wilfred, Winifred
• Bettie, Doris, Doreen
• Maivis, Maude, Maurine.... You won't see many young British people with these names either.

Apparently muggle and wizard first names have simply become more similar in the last few generations. Also recall that wizards tend to live longer than muggles: so their names are often relatively older

And let's also remember that a lot of the younger generation are nicknames

• Ginevra, Ronald, Percival

Or strange

• Draco, Millicent, Marietta

Even if they aren't wizard born

• Hemione

In fact outside of Harry's immediate friendship group, there are more strange names than normal ones, by our standards. And I'd suggest that Ron, Neville and Harry weren't popular or normal muggle names before the Potter books.... I don't know a single Harry, and have never met a Neville or Ronald under the age of 70

Answer 6

They probably were named by a Seer

Many names in Harry Potter appear to be just a bit too apt. Remus, bitten by a werewolf; Bellatrix, possessed of a warlike demeanor; Minerva McGonagall, having wisdom. There is a reason for this: they were named by someone who could see the future! According to Pottermore:

A certain sector of magical society, however, follows the ancient wizarding practice of consulting a Naming Seer, who (usually for a hefty payment of gold) will predict the child's future and suggest an appropriate moniker.

As to what constitutes an "appropriate" name:

A very great variety of first names are given to children by their wizard parents, some of them being what we might think of as Muggle names (e.g. James, Harry, Ronald), others giving a distinct flavour of the personality or destiny of the bearer (e.g. Xenophilius, Remus, Alecto).

This explains most of the meaningful first names. It does not really explain the meaningful last names, but those are significantly fewer, or more coincidental.

In any case, this applies more to older generations, thus explaining why the teachers have significantly stranger names than the students:

This practice is becoming increasingly rare. Many parents prefer to 'let him/her find his/her own way', and dislike (with good reason) receiving premature hints of aptitude, limitations or, at worst, catastrophe.