Word.ws English Dictionary

Percival

/ˈpɜː(ɹ)sɪvəl/

Percival proper noun: a male given name from the Celtic languages.

Proper noun

Percival

  1. A male given name from the Celtic languages.
    • Lancelot Fortescue! What a name! And what was the other son - Percival? He wondered what the first Mrs Fortescue had been like? She had a curious taste in Christian names...1953, Agatha Christie, A Pocket Full of Rye, page 20
  2. A surname originating as a patronymic.
  3. An unincorporated community and census-designated place in Fremont County, Iowa, United States.
  4. A former hamlet in Saskatchewan, Canada.

Forms of Percival

alternative formPursifull

Origin of Percival

From Old French Perceval, name of a knight in a twelfth century Arthurian romance by the French poet Chrétien de Troyes. Shaped like Old French percier (“pierce”) + val (“valley”), but probably representing some Gaulish or Old Welsh name, possibly related to Welsh Peredur, from ber (“spear, lance”) (from Middle Welsh ber, from Proto-Brythonic *ber, from Proto-Celtic *beru (“spit”)) + dur (“hard metal, steel”) (see Latin durus). Cognate with German Parzival and Parsifal.

Questions about Percival

What does Percival mean?
Percival means a male given name from the Celtic languages.
What part of speech is Percival?
Percival is a proper noun.
How do you pronounce Percival?
Percival is pronounced /ˈpɜː(ɹ)sɪvəl/.

Words near Percival in the dictionary

  1. percipiency
  2. percipiendum
  3. percipient
  4. percipiently
  5. percipients
  6. Percival
  7. Percival's cattleya
  8. Percle
  9. Percles
  10. perclose
  11. percloses

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Percival (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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