Perdita (given name)

Perdita

Florizel and Perdita from William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale by Mary F Raphael, ca. 1901.
Gender	Feminine
Language	Latin
Origin
Meaning	lost

Perdita is a feminine given name derived from perditus, meaning lost. It was used by William Shakespeare for an abandoned princess, the heroine of his 1610 play The Winter's Tale, and for a canine heroine of Dodie Smith's 1956 book The Hundred and One Dalmatians and the Walt Disney Pictures 1961 film adaptation of the book, One Hundred and One Dalmatians.

Women

• Perdita Barran, English chemist
• Perdita Buchan (born 1940), Anglo-American author
• Perdita Felicien (born 1980), Canadian track athlete
• Perdita Huston (1936–2001), American women's rights activist
• Perdita Stevens (born 1966), British mathematician and computer scientist
• Perdita Weeks (born 1985), British actress

Fiction

• Perdita (The Winter's Tale), the heroine of Shakespeare's play The Winter's Tale
• Perdita Boyte, a character from the 1936 novel And Berry Came Too by Dornford Yates
• Perdita Halley Reisden, a character in Sarah Smith's historical mystery seriesThe Vanished Child, The Knowledge of Water, Citizen of the Country and Crimes and Survivors
• Perdita Hyde-Sinclair, a character from the British soap opera Emmerdale
• Perdita Nitt, aka Agnes Nitt, a character in the Witches subset of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series
• Perdita Willoughby-Lloyd, a minor character from the TV series The Haunting of Bly Manor
• Queen Perdita of Vlatava, a character of the animated superhero series Young Justice
• Perdita, a female Dalmatian dog in The Hundred and One Dalmatians, a 1956 children's novel by Dodie Smith, and the media franchise based on the novel; see 101 Dalmatians (disambiguation)
• The Free Ship Perdita, a sky-sailing ship in the 1999 novel Stardust (1999) by Neil Gaiman
• Perdita Verney, character in The Last Man by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

References