Yente Van Doren

Yenta or Yente () is a Yiddish woman's given name. It is a variant form of the name ''Yentl'' (), which ultimately is thought to be derived from the Italian word ''gentile'', meaning 'noble' or 'refined'.

The name has entered American English only in the form ''yenta'' in the senses of "meddler, busybody, blabbermouth, gossip" and is not only used to refer to women. Both the forms ''yenta'' and ''yente'' are used in Yinglish (Jewish varieties of English) to refer to someone who is a gossip or a busybody.

The use of ''yenta'' as a word for 'busybody' originated in the age of Yiddish theatre. During and after World War I, Yiddish-language discs recorded in New York by theatre actors such as Clara Gold and Gus Goldstein portrayed the characters Mendel and Yente Telebende and sold so well that dozens of copycat recordings were made. The popularity continued in the 1920s and 1930s as the humorist Jacob Adler, writing under the pen name B. Kovner for ''The Jewish Daily Forward'', wrote a series of comic sketches featuring the characters, with Yente as a 'henpecking wife'. The popularity of the character led to the name developing its colloquial sense of 'a gossip'.

There is a mistaken belief that the word for a Jewish matchmaker is ''yenta'' or ''yente''. In reality a Jewish matchmaker is called a ''shadchan'' (שדכן). The origin of this error is the 1964 musical ''Fiddler on the Roof'', in which a character named Yente serves as the matchmaker for the village of Anatevka.

Notable persons

* Yente Serdatzky, Jewish-American Yiddish-language writer.
*Yente (18th-century), Jewish spiritual Hasidic leader
*Rosanne Yente Hertzberger, Dutch microbiologist and politician
* from Yentl en De Boer
*Yentl Vandevelde
*Yentl Van Genechten

See also

* Yentl (disambiguation)

References

{{reflist

Yiddish words and phrases
Yiddish feminine given names
Judaism and women