Yenta

Yenta or Yente (Template:Lang-yi) is a Yiddish women'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 Yinglish—i.e., become a Yiddish loanword in Jewish varieties of English—as a word referring to a woman who is a gossip or a busybody.

The use of yenta as a word for 'busybody' originated in the age of Yiddish theater. In the 1920s and 1930s the humorist Jacob Adler, writing under the pen name B. Kovner for The Jewish Daily Forward, wrote a series of comic sketches featuring the character Yente Telebende, a henpecking wife. The popularity of the character led to the name developing its colloquial sense of 'a gossip'.

Since a character named Yente serves as the matchmaker for the village of Anatevkain the 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof, and also because a good matchmaker asks detailed questions to both sides, the word has become stereotypically associated with matchmakers.

Societal impact

Yenta was the name of an Israeli spy agency in the 1960s TV sitcom Get Smart, in an episode titled 'The Man from Yenta'. In a different sitcom named after the main family, The Goldbergs, the group of women surrounding mother, Beverly Goldberg, call themselves "Frentas" a combination of the word "Friends" and "Yentas".

The name has also been used for:

• The Linux CardBus controller, which brings together Cardbus cards with the rest of the computer
• The name of a highly available key-value store for Perl

See also

• Yentl
• Yente Serdatzky, Jewish-American Yiddish-language writer.