Word.ws English Dictionary

Cressida

Cressida proper noun: a female given name from Ancient Greek.

Proper noun

Cressida (countable and uncountable, plural Cressidas)

  1. (countable) A female given name from Ancient Greek.
    • Of course, Cressida had looked up her name online.
      Reporting to her parents, incensed: "'Cressida'―or 'Criseyde'―isn't nice at all. She's 'faithless'―that's how people thought of her in the Middle Ages .Chaucer wrote about her, and then Shakespeare. ( - - - )"
      "Oh, honey, come on. We don't believe...2014, Joyce Carol Oates, Carthage, Fourth Estate, →ISBN, page 38
  2. A moon of Uranus, Solar System.

Forms of Cressida

pluralCressidas
alternative formCresida

Origin of Cressida

Used by Geoffrey Chaucer, also by Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida (1602), from Italian Criseida (which Boccaccio mistakenly substituted for Briseida (“Briseis”)), from Ancient Greek Χρυσηΐς (Khrusēḯs), from Ancient Greek χρυσός (khrusós, “gold”).

Questions about Cressida

What does Cressida mean?
Cressida means a female given name from Ancient Greek.
What part of speech is Cressida?
Cressida is a proper noun.

Words near Cressida in the dictionary

  1. cresset
  2. cressets
  3. Cressey
  4. Cresseys
  5. cressid
  6. Cressida
  7. Cressidian
  8. cressids
  9. Cressing
  10. Cressington
  11. Cresskill

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Cressida (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “Cressida.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cressida. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.