Silas (name) The Latin name "Silvanus" may be derived from pre-Roman Italian languages. Silas (name) Silas is a common given name and a lesser-known surname. It is a cognate of Silvanus. Silas as a name today comes from the early Christian disciple Silas. He is consistently called "Silas" in Acts, but the Latin Silvanus, which means "of the forest," is always used by Paul and in the First Epistle of Peter; it is likely that "Silvanus" is the Romanized version of the original "Silas," or that "Silas" is the Greek nickname for "Silvanus." It has been suggested that Silas is the Greek
English words of Greek origin by far the most common English plural). Though most learned borrowings and coinages follow the Latin system, there are some exceptions: "eureka" ("cf." "heuristic"), "kinetic" ("cf." "cinematography"), "krypton" ("cf." "cryptic"). In the 19th and 20th centuries, a few learned words and phrases were introduced using a transliteration of Ancient Greek, rather than the traditional Latin-based spelling and morphology or dropped inflectional endings, "e.g.", "nous" (νοῦς), "hoi polloi" (οἱ πολλοί), "kudos" (κύδος), "moron" (μωρόν). Some words whose spelling in French and Middle English did not reflect their Greco-Latin origins were refashioned with etymological spellings in the 16th and 17th centuries: "caracter"