<p>Last night's episode of <i>The Flash</i> mentioned the fact that weirdass name Eobard is a future name. They did the same in <i>The Flashpoint Paradox</i>, and probably elsewhere. Aaargh no.
</p><p>To demonstrate that I didn't take an elective in Old Germanic for nothing:
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Eobard is a perfectly normal English name.
</p><p>The name is composed of two elements: <i>eo</i> and <i>bard</i>.
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- Éo is an old word, meaning (war)horse. You may remember this from Lord of the Rings: Éomer and Éowyn. Old English for Horse-fame and Horse-joy. It comes from PIE *h₁éḱwos. It's not used in any Germanic language anymore, but the Latin word for horse, Equus, is derived from the same root.
- Bard can mean a couple of things. In this sense, it's not a) the immortal kind - that word is of Celtic origin, or b) armor, from Old French. In Germanic, it comes from from Proto-Germanic *bardoz. It either means beard or... beard. The beard of an axe that is, so synecdochically, an axe. It survives in the word halberd and the name Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
<p>So yeah. Eobard. Not a future name. Horse-axe. Or Horse-beard. Make of it what you will. Before you think too much into it: except for some literary characters like Beowulf, the names were never meant to convey anything, or even mean anything ("having the beard of a horse"?!), that's just a characteristic people gave to it because Greek, Latin and Hebrew names usually did. They're just a couple of name elements that run in the family (or sound like ones that run in the family), slapped together.
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