George Redmonds, a researcher with the British National Archives studying 14th-century names, finds a girl’s moniker that pops with recognition: Diot Coke. Redmonds believes Coke was a corruption of “Cook,” and “Diot” was a diminutive of Dionisia, the modern-day name Denise. He says Dionisia was a very common name then. Diot Coke was born in 1379 in West Riding, Yorkshire. {listen}


Difficult Latin forms
Not all the Latin forms of men's names ended in -us. John and Andrew were 'Johannes' and 'Andreas' whilst Adam and Thomas were unchanged but had the genitive forms 'Ade' and 'Thome'. Unfortunately there are some Latin spellings which bear little resemblance to the English names and these have to be learnt. 'Radulfus' for Ralph is difficult enough but it is even further from the medieval name which was written Rawfe and could be pronounced 'Raw', the 'f' silent.
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CHRISTIAN NAMES IN LOCAL AND FAMILY HISTORY
This was responsible for the surnames Rawes and Rawson and the popular diminutive Rawlin gave rise to Rawlinson. There could be problems too with Denis, James, Geoffrey and Giles, usually recorded as 'Dionisius', 'Jacobus', 'Galfridus' and 'Egidius'. Giles is not thought of now as a female name so the occasional 'Egidia' reminds us how useful the Latin inflection can be. 'Dionisius' and 'Dionisia', our modern Denis and Denise, were almost equally popular in the fourteenth century and either of them might have given rise to the surnames Denison and Dennison. However, it was Dionisia of Linthwaite who was respon- sible for Dyson, via the short form 'Di', and this, together with frequent late spellings such as 'Dionis', points to possible alternative pronunciations.4 The diminutive Diot produced the unfortunate combination Diot Coke in 1379.