National Anna Day

Anna is not so much a variant of Hannah as the form Hannah travelled in. It is the form of Hannah used in the Greek and Latin Old Testament. Later Old Testament translations, English among them, printed the Hannah spelling instead, and Anna simply stayed.

It had a second life in the New Testament, where an Anna appears briefly as a prophetess who recognises Jesus as the Messiah. The name was popular in the Byzantine Empire from an early date. In medieval Western Europe it spread through the veneration of Saint Anna, the name tradition gives to the mother of the Virgin Mary.

England took the Latin form and kept the vernacular ones beside it. Ann, Anne and Anna have been used together there since the late Middle Ages, which is why a page about one of them has to be careful about the other two.

Nobody knows. There is no calendar behind October 22, no organisation running it, and no trace of whoever first put the two together. The sentence that circulates online about netizens inventing it in the early days of the internet is attributable to no one and repeated word for word across scraper sites.

What the record does hold is use. People mark it, businesses mark it, and newspapers mark it.